


You Cried Wolf So I Came Running

by LayALioness



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Boxers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-29
Updated: 2016-04-29
Packaged: 2018-06-05 07:46:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 45,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6696001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LayALioness/pseuds/LayALioness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“The city’s dangerous,” he tells her, “You never know what demons might be lurking round the corner.”</p><p>He means it as a joke, and so Octavia tosses her hair back, haughty, and says “I’ll just kill them all.”</p><p>Bellamy grins. He’s always supported her dreams, no matter how outlandish. When she was little, and decided she wanted to be a cat when she grew up, he tied a scarf around her waist, to dangle like a tail. “What, every demon in Hell’s Kitchen? What’ll you do when they’re gone?”</p><p>“I’ll take their place.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Cried Wolf So I Came Running

**Author's Note:**

> ok so this is what happens when I get too emotional about both, the blake siblings AND daredevil.  
> this mostly focuses on octavia, so the bellarke is very secondary, while octaven and the blake sibs are more prevalent.  
> idk if i'm ever going to write a sequel to this, but i left it open ended on purpose, just in case i wanted to come back to this verse.

Bellamy Blake is twenty-one when he gets the call his mom died in a car accident at forty-three. She was on her way to pick up Octavia from school, but by the time word gets to Bellamy, it’s already three in the morning, and his mother’s been cold for twelve hours in the morgue. He’s at the gym when the call gets through, taking a break for a smoke and a six pack with some of the boys, hands still shaking from the adrenaline of his last fight. It was off the books, but fair, and he hit the mat hard a few times before finally taking the other guy out. He was new, skinny and nervous, folks call him Sterling Silver or some shit like that. A pretty name for a pretty face, even if he’ll wake up with one hell of a facial scar, from Bellamy’s right hook.

Dax passes him the pay phone, because his mom didn’t have his cell phone number when she listed his contact information at O’s school. He talks to the cop on the other end of the line, just for a few minutes, just to go over the facts. His mom’s dead, the bank owns her apartment, and Octavia has nowhere to go. She’s staying with a friend for the night, some girl named Zoe whom Bellamy’s met a handful of times, when he managed to swing by to see his sister on weekends.

They have options, the cop says. If Bellamy can’t afford to take O, they could send her to a foster home, or she might even qualify for boarding at the Catholic school she goes to. It’s the same one their mom grew up in, and even when she was struggling to make ends meet, selling herself on the corner and desperate, Aurora stayed on good terms with the headmistress there. Enough to get both her kids enrolled and pay half the usual rate of tuition, at least.

But Bellamy knows they don’t have options, not really. He thinks about it for a second, if that. Thinks about how he can barely afford to keep himself alive, let alone an eleven year old dependent. Thinks about how tiny and crumbling his apartment is, in the hollowed-out dregs of Hell’s Kitchen, just the size of a postage stamp with a serious roach problem. With the neighbors upstairs who are always fighting, and the neighbors downstairs who always fuck. Bellamy doesn’t know _who_ has the dog that’s always barking, but it’s a menace either way. How the security door hasn’t worked for months, and the elevator’s been out even longer. How there’s always spoiled milk in the fridge because he can’t even remember to check the dates on time. How he always comes home aching, stitching himself up with shots of cheap whiskey and the sewing kit he keeps in the cabinet, though he’s used the needle more on his own skin, than clothes these days.

He thinks about how maybe, the foster home would be the better choice for everyone, including O.

But in the end, he knows he won’t let that happen. He can’t. His sister, his responsibility, and he’s not about to put that on anyone else’s shoulders. So Bellamy thanks the officer for the call, and tells him that he’ll pick his sister up later that day. And then he hangs up and tries to remember what it is that kids need, what he’ll need to swing by the store to get her. A toothbrush, shampoo, does she need tampons, yet? He’s only got the one bedroom, so he’ll let her have it, while he takes the couch. He’s got a bare-boned mattress that he needs to get replaced, but knows he won’t. Mattresses are expensive and anyway, the springs aren’t poking through yet, so it’ll do.

Bellamy swings by the address the cop gave him, and picks his sister up at eight in the morning. She comes running out through the screen door, still wearing her pajama shorts and night shirt, feet bare on the small patch of front lawn, and launches herself at him. She doesn’t cry, but she doesn’t need to. Bellamy hasn’t cried in years; they’re Blake’s, after all. Made of stronger stuff. Like demons.

Later, when Octavia finally brings it up and asks him if he ever thought about just letting her go to the state, and maybe get adopted by some rich couple in Upper Manhattan, or move into a foster home in Queens, Bellamy tells her the truth.

“Yeah,” he says, and kisses her hair. It smells like the cheap discount shampoo at Walgreens. “But that was never really an option. Blake’s take care of each other, remember?”

“Yeah,” she agrees. “I remember.”

 

Octavia is just eleven when she moves in with her brother, the hero of her childhood and still her biggest idol, even if he does stumble through the door each night, dripping blood and bourbon. He teaches her to thread the hooked needle, and pull it through the gashes on his eyebrows and wrist bones, how to bite the thread off with her teeth. And then he tells her stories, like he used to when she was little, back when he used to fudge the endings, to make them happier than they were. On summer nights, he’ll tug her out into the tiny backyard the building shares, the one their crack addict neighbors use to get high, but Bellamy always chases them off so they can have the space to themselves. They camp out on one of his threadbare quilts, while he teaches her the constellations. Sometimes they’ll make s’mores on the stove top, if Bellamy has enough extra cash to go buy the good chocolate down at the corner store, and Octavia always falls asleep without brushing her teeth, and she feels like she’s gotten away with something.

Octavia still goes to school, under Bellamy’s orders. She offers to transfer to the public junior high down the street, but he refuses, and she learns to just not bring it up. She isn’t sure how he manages to pay the tuition every semester, and she doesn’t ask. The school work keeps her busy, and she works on it at the local gym where Bellamy trains. She nestles in the back on the ancient wooden bleachers, with her sweater laid out under her to guard from splinters. There’s a water boy named Atom, who works there in the afternoons sometimes, and he’s sweet on her. Octavia knows, because Bellamy makes sure to give him extra jobs to do, so he won’t have any time to lean on the bleachers beside her and do his best to make her laugh.

Bellamy helps her with what homework he can; Octavia’s never been the best with books, not like he is, but Bellamy had trouble with authority all his life, and so even though he passed every test, he racked up too many detentions. She still catches him sometimes, staying up and reading one of her textbooks for fun, or writing stories in the cheap spiral journals he buys in handfuls whenever they’re on sale. He’ll read them to her some nights, when she claims she can’t sleep. They’re mostly adventure stories, filled with charming heroes, and fierce princesses, and dragons and magic worlds. He never writes about Hell’s Kitchen, or about their mom. He never writes about real life, but he always writes a happy ending, and the good guys always win.

The first time Octavia gets detention, it’s for fighting a boy twice her size, who called her mother a whore. She knocks him out, skinning her knuckles on his teeth, and when Bellamy comes to pick her up from the headmistress’s office, he takes her hands in his, to inspect her battle wounds. He lets out a low whistle and teases, “We’re gonna have to get you a pair of gloves.”

After that, he starts training her. Just little things, when he has the time and she’s finished studying. Self-defense mostly, a few choke holds that are probably illegal, and how to gouge an eye out with a ballpoint pen. 

“The city’s dangerous,” he tells her, “You never know what demons might be lurking round the corner.”

He means it as a joke, and so Octavia tosses her hair back, haughty, and says “I’ll just kill them all.”

Bellamy grins. He’s always supported her dreams, no matter how outlandish. When she was little, and decided she wanted to be a cat when she grew up, he tied a scarf around her waist, to dangle like a tail. “What, every demon in Hell’s Kitchen? What’ll you do when they’re gone?”

“I’ll take their place,” she decides, and he laughs, swings an arm over her shoulders and leans heavily on her, the whole walk home. He took a couple bad hits in the ribs tonight, and he’s sort of breathing funny. But it’s fine; Octavia can take his weight. She’ll make him lie down with some frozen peas on his stomach, because that’s what they do. They’re Blake’s; they take care of each other.

Bellamy was barely making ends meet before Octavia arrived on his doorstep, so she knows she’s the reason he gets in deep with the Irish, taking on fights that he knows he can’t win, no matter how quick he is. She walks in to find him whispering harshly into his cell phone; he always stops when he sees her, or walks into the other room, but she doesn’t have to hear him, to know what it’s about. They make him start lifting weights, so they can move him up a class, putting him up against guys twice his size. Giant guys, with arms the size of oak trees, and twice the strength. Octavia always holds her breath in those fights, but she never looks away. If her brother takes the belt, she wants to see it.

And if he goes down, she wants to see that too, wants to be ready to jump up the second his face hits the mat.

When they were kids, and ran around through the apartment, crashing into anything that made the mistake of getting in their way, their mom used to yell at them. She’d say “Who let two devils loose in my living room?”and they’d laugh and run away. She used to say they each had a devil inside of them, and the whole world paid whenever they let it out. She and the neighbors all had a good laugh over it–“Be careful of those Blake kids,” they all said. “They got the devil in em.”

These days, Octavia thinks she understands what her mom meant. Sometimes when she looks at her brother out of the corner of her eye, she’ll see the flash of anger that shakes loose in the ring. In the ring, he lets the devil out, but he always gets it reigned back in by the time the bell rings, and Octavia doesn’t know how he does it. Her anger is a wild thing, red hot and all-consuming. She barely remembers her fight with the boy; just the color red, the smell of coppery blood, and the sound of his bone crunching under her fist. She’s not sure she ever caught her devil back, after that day. Maybe it’s still wandering the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, picking fights and picking pockets. Maybe it went home to hell.

Bellamy punctures a lung in one fight, rib cracked by an undercut he didn’t see coming, and Octavia doesn’t actually realize that her brother might die, until she’s curled up in the waiting room of St. Anne’s Mercy Emergency Room, picking at a scab on her knee. It rips open, and blood trickles down her shin, staining her white ankle socks a soft pink. Octavia pretends not to notice. She’s surrounded by low-level gangsters; muggers with broken noses because they picked the wrong people to rob; drug addicts who overdosed in the Motel 8 nearby; old people whose Medicaid can’t pay for more than some typhoid-ridden ER in the middle of the ghetto. She pretends not to see them, too.

Bellamy doesn’t die, and three hours after he gets out of surgery, the nurse comes to fetch her. He’s been asking, pestering them about where his sister was, and Octavia doesn’t doubt for a minute that he’d walk out in nothing but the open paper gown, to find her. As it is, when they walk in he’s starting to sit up, pulling at the tubes in his veins–but he stops the moment he sees her, grin splitting his mauled up face. He looks like a bruised peach, brown and purple all over, but he’s still smiling, which seems like a good sign.

“Hey, O,” he says, and Octavia doesn’t mean to burst into tears, hasn’t really felt like crying for the past six hours, but suddenly it’s all just too much. She cries more, and harder, and longer than she did for her mom, and she only feels a little bit guilty about it. Mostly she just feels relieved.

Bellamy just opens his arms up and she crawls onto the plastic cot beside him. It’s a tight fit, but they make it work. When she was little, and Bellamy was still in high school, she used to sneak into his bed whenever she had bad dreams. He’d rub her back and whisper stories until she fell asleep. She always slept better when her brother was near. She knew he’d protect her.

“Hey, what, did you think I’d go out that easy? That hurts, O. You know it’ll take more than some lucky shot, to take me out for good _._ ” Bellamy starts to rub her back as Octavia’s sobs soften, soothing her like he used to when she was younger. 

“I don’t want you to fight those big guys anymore,” she says, feeling small, because she knows he only took those fights because they need the money, and she knows they only need the money because of her.

But Bellamy just nods, pressing a kiss to her hair. “No more heavies,” he agrees, “I promise _._ ”

The paycheck he gets for the fight covers his medical bills, their groceries for the next month, and new clothes for Octavia. She gets to pick them out of a magazine that comes in the mail, and Bellamy spends the afternoon figuring out how to place the order. He grins, a little victory. His mouth is still crooked, with a permanent scar on his upper lip, and his eyes are still dark and bloodshot, but he’s  _alive_  and they’re together—and honestly it’s probably shitty, being a little glad that her mom’s gone, and Octavia misses her, she does, but.

She used to have dreams about running away with her big brother, driving cross country in some classic car like in the movies on AMC, or flying in one of those big turbo-jet planes, or taking a cruise ship to the Bahamas. They’d take the world by storm, her as a ballerina-firefighter-ninja, and Bellamy as a story teller, like the kind from the King Arthur mini-series her mom used to watch every month.

And this might not be  _quite_  her dream–them sitting on the kitchen counter, eating captain crunch dry because Bellamy forgot to check the milk again, as he quizzes her on her vocabulary–but it’s pretty close.

She has to write an essay on her hero, for school. The other kids write about Mother Theresa and Ghandi and Anne Hathaway. Octavia writes about her brother, about how when he got tired of living under their mom’s rules and finally left home, he slid his favorite necklace, the one he never took off, around her neck. It was just some parachute cord knotted together, and a small pendant with St. Nicholas, the patron saint of fighters.

“But you need this,” she said, picking up the pendant so she could study it upside down, and Bellamy grinned at her, not quite crooked yet. There was just a small starburst of bruising on his cheekbone. He was still early in the fighting ring, still a lightweight with more losses than not.

She knew that before each fight, he kissed the pendant, and said the Lord’s Prayer, for good luck more than anything. She knew he didn’t go to church, not even on Easter and Christmas, and when she asked why he still prayed he shrugged and said “It’s good to have a ritual. Keeps your head on straight.”

“Nah, I’ll be fine,” he promised, and gave her hair a tug. She recently tried to cut it into layers in the bathroom. Her mom had a cow when she got home and saw the floor. “Besides--you need it too. Us Blake’s are fighters, remember? This’ll keep you safe while I’m not around.”

Octavia sniffed, willing herself not to cry. Blake’s didn’t cry. But Bellamy just softened, tugging her into his arms. “But you’re coming back, right?” she asked, muffled by his shoulder.

He nodded. “Yeah, I’m coming back.” He pulls away so he can press a kiss to her hair, and stand. “I’ll never leave you behind, O. I promise.”

Sister Agatha puts the essays up on the cork board that lines the school hall, and invites the students’ parents over on a Friday evening, to drink fruit punch and eat those little crème sandwich cookies from Aldi’s, and read over their kids’ work. Bellamy shows up late, fresh from a fight. It was legit this time, and Octavia wishes she’d thought to give him back the necklace.

She finds him standing in the hall, staring at her essay, tacked up right in the middle of the top row. She tugs on the sleeve of his scuffed up leather jacket, and he jumps, sniffing a little, wiping the back of his knuckles across his nose.

“Hey,” he grins, looking down at her, and she can still see the trace of tears caught in his eyelashes. “You forgot to tell them about that time I gave all your my little ponies to the pitbull, down the road.”

“That’ll be the next essay,” she says primly. He laughs and follows her back to the snack table.

He hangs the essay on the fridge and every time Octavia glances at it, she reaches up to touch the pendant, tucked under her shirt, and she feels loved.

Octavia’s fifteen when she loses her sight.

She’s walking to the gym, after school, and when the kid falls off his scooter, in the direct line of the truck, she doesn’t even think before darting out, and pushing him to safety.

She gets the boy out of the way in time, but Octavia isn’t so lucky. The next thing she knows, she’s on her back, on the pavement. Bellamy’s cradling her head, saying her name over and over, and he’s crying. She can feel his tears where they land on her hair, and that’s what scares her more than anything, because she’s never seen her brother cry. Her brother _doesn’t_ cry; he used to brag about it, when they were growing up. And whenever anyone asked why, he’d say “Because devils don’t cry,” and laugh.

“Bell?” she asks, voice slurred. She doesn’t feel hurt—she doesn’t feel anything, and the whole world is blurred around the edges, beginning to fade to black. Her eyes start to sting, like she dripped shampoo in them, and she tries to rub it out. Bellamy catches her wrists and holds them, but the stinging is getting worse, and she whimpers.

“You’re going to be alright,” Bellamy says, but he’s still crying. He wouldn’t be crying if that were true, right? That’s just the sort of thing people say to other people when they’re dying, to make them feel better. Octavia’s pretty sure somebody said it to her mom, the night she died. 

“You don’t know that,” she accuses, the pain in her eyes fading to a dull throb. Bellamy brushes the hair from her face, and the last thing she sees is his smile, still crooked from a few recent cuts.

“I promised you I wouldn’t let anything hurt you, and you know I don’t break my promises,” he says, and it’s stupid, how quickly that reassures her. Even if she does die, at least her brother’s here.

“You’re not gonna die, O,” he says, fierce, so she must have accidentally said that out loud. “The ambulance is almost here.”

“I can’t see you,” Octavia whispers, and feels a few tears leak from the corners of her eyes, without her permission. At least the water helps sooth the sting a little.

Bellamy wipes them away. “Close your eyes,” he tells her. “I’ll be there when you open them again.”

She does, and he is; riding with her the whole way to the hospital, refusing to let go of her hand. They must give her some sort of drug in the ambulance, because when she comes to, she’s in a hospital bed. Or at least, she’s pretty sure it’s a hospital bed. It  _feels_  like a hospital bed.

Bellamy clears his throat, to her left, and it feels like a thunderstorm in her head.

“Octavia?”he asks, worried and confused, as she starts to scream, trying to cover her ears. The computer beeping, the voices outside the room, the sound of heavy breathing, the footsteps, the ding of an elevator down the hall, her brother’s heart rate–it’s all too much. It’s too overwhelming, too painfully loud, until she feels Bellamy’s hands cover her own, over her ears.

“Better?” his voice is muffled, but clear, and Octavia nods. “What is it? Is it too loud?” Octavia nods again, and he readjusts his hands until they’re covering her ears completely, like a pair of very warm ear muffs. 

She almost doesn’t even notice that she still can’t see. Her eyes are open, and there’s nothing covering them, but there’s still nothing there. Or at least, not that she can tell. Not even shadows or grayscales of light, like Octavia knows some blind people see. Apparently, her blindness is a different flavor.

“The doctor said you probably won’t ever get your sight back,” Bellamy says, quiet. He clears his throat again, albeit lowly, like he remembers right at the last minute. “We should probably invest in some canes.”

It gets an absurd laugh out of Octavia, which she knows was what he was going for. She can practically feel her brother’s goofy grin.

That’s what she latches onto, when the world becomes too heavy for her to breathe. Bellamy helps her learn to walk again, holds onto her arms as she memorizes the number of steps from the front door to the back door, from the kitchen to the bathroom, from the sofa to the stairs, from her bed to her closet. He washes her hair in the kitchen sink, because she’s too nervous to try taking a shower, and in the morning he actually does take her to a sporting goods store, to shop for canes. He presses each one into her hands, so she can feel the grain of the wood or the sleekness of the metal, and she picks one that feels like tree bark to the touch.

Everything is still too loud, so loud she can hardly even think most times. Bellamy lets her stay home from school for the next few weeks, but even their apartment is too much. There’s the scurry of mice under the floorboards, and there’s a cricket somewhere in her wall, and the neighbors downstairs are being particularly loud lately, like they don’t really care who hears. Maybe they’re making a porno.

Bellamy orders her new copies of her textbooks off amazon, in braille, and reads up on wiki-how, on how to learn it. She knows they must cost a lot of money, like the canes, and the audio books that he gets her, but Bellamy doesn’t bring it up and so she doesn’t either. She learned a while ago not to bring up money. Even outside the ring, sometimes Bellamy lets his devil out.

She doesn’t realize he’s teaching himself as well, so he can still help tutor her, and proofread her notes. She doesn’t realize he’s teaching himself to  _write_  it, until he hands her a notebook. It’s one of the bound, mead ones, the kind it’s hard to tear pages from, and she flips to the first one.

It’s a story about a princess who’s blind, but uses echolocation and her fighting prowess to protect her city at night. Octavia tears up halfway through the first chapter, but not because it’s particularly  _sad_.

She walks carefully into the kitchen, counting her steps and keeping her arms braced out against the walls and in front of her, just in case he forgot to put a chair away or something. He didn’t of course. He’s even started replacing the milk before it expires.

Bellamy’s cooking something at the stove–it’s spaghetti, she can smell it–and Octavia leans against his side.

“I want to start training again,” she says, and to his credit, her brother only goes stiff and terrified for a moment.

“Okay,” he grants, because even if he’d said no, she still probably would have done it, and anyway he’s been trying to get her out of the house for days _._ ”But I’m gonna need to find you a new instructor. I’m picking up shifts as a personal trainer, for extra cash, and it’s kind of a time-suck.”

Octavia does her best not to seem disappointed. She sees her brother all the time, constantly these days, so there’s really no point in making him also spend his work hours with her. But–it feels a little wrong, taking lessons from someone who isn’t Bellamy. He’s been the only one teaching her for years.

As it turns out, he apparently already has an instructor on standby, and was just waiting for Octavia to bring it up. 

“I didn’t want to force you,” he explains on their way to the gym. It’s a Saturday, and Octavia starts back up at school that Monday, so it’ll be good to get all her nervous energy out.

Hell’s Kitchen has always been dangerous, but Octavia really only knew about it in an abstract sort of way. Friends of friends who had been mugged or raped or shot in a drive-by. Never someone she actually  _knew_ , and certainly never her.

But a blind girl wandering around the city, unprotected and with only a handful of self-defense classes she sort of remembers? She might as well paint a giant target on her back. She’d made a general sort of name for herself, before the accident. She was never a body builder, and only actually trained whenever she felt like it and had the time, but Octavia managed to  _look_  tough. And she could hold her own in a fight, when push came to shove, so that helped too. But she knows that now, everything is different.

The instructor is already there when they arrive; Octavia can tell. She can tell a lot of things these days, things she shouldn’t be able to, and she knows Bellamy’s noticed and he’s itching to ask, but she also knows he won’t bring it up until she does, which puts them in a bit of a stale mate. Octavia wants him to know without having to be the one to tell him, and she doesn’t want to tell anyone else. She’s not even sure what she’s going through, let alone how to explain it to others.

“You must be the Blake’s,” the instructor says, voice rich with a clipped accent that Octavia doesn’t recognize. She’s smaller than Octavia was expecting, but that’s fine. Octavia’s smaller, too. “I’ve heard a lot about you two.”

“Hopefully good things,” Bellamy says, turning on the charm as Octavia fights back an eye roll. Who knows; if the Blake charm works, they might not have to pay for dinner. 

“Mostly that you’re both hellions,” the instructor says, clearly not amused. “And apparently have devils inside of you.” Octavia doesn’t have to be able to see, to know the instructor is eyeing the fight posters hung on the wall, the newest one of Bellamy right up above the manager’s desk. “They call you the old devil of hell’s kitchen,” she says, and Octavia laughs like she always does.

“Shut up, O,” Bellamy says, mild, and flicks her softly in the forehead. But Octavia can’t stop giggling, because of the stupid devil horns that she knows he’s wearing in the poster, for publicity or whatever it’s called. Honestly, Octavia’s pretty sure they were just fucking with him, when he got the pictures done.

“That’s me,” Bellamy agrees. “O was hoping you could teach her.” 

“I was hoping  _you_  could teach me,” Octavia corrects. “But you’re too busy, so you called someone else.”

Octavia can tell the instructor is raising an eyebrow; she same way she knows the instructor smokes cigars regularly, which doesn’t seem like very good boxing coach behavior. The same way she knows the instructor is holding a heavy wooden cane, which could probably break Octavia’s own cane in half. 

“How come my brother called you? _”_ Octavia asks, before she can stop herself, and Bellamy hisses her name.

“It’s alright,” the instructor says, and then clicks her tongue, letting the sound of it echo through the room. “I have been blind since I was six years old. There’s a lot you still need to learn.”

By now, Bellamy has wandered off towards the speed bags, under the pretense of giving them privacy, though Octavia knows he would never venture far. He wants to be near her at all times, just in case, and while it’s sweet and she loves him for it, it’s infuriating too. Octavia used to be able to take care of herself. She probably still could, if the world would let her.

If  _she_  would let herself.

The instructor–Indra, she introduces herself as–is quiet for another moment before speaking. “What is it that you want to  _do_ , miss Blake?”

“I _—”_ Octavia glances over at where Bellamy’s started stacking the boxes of red gloves and foam helmets, for sparring later. She can’t remember the last time he wasn’t doing something for her, or for the gym or the town or the nuns at her school. She’s always wanted to be more like her brother, but now there’s a different motivation moving her forwards. She can hear his labored breathing at night, when he thinks she’s asleep. She knows that whatever Twisted Tristan did to him in their last fight, Bellamy hasn’t healed correctly. He maybe never will., and Octavia isn’t about to let him keep putting himself in the hospital, just so he can take care of her. 

“I want to protect myself and the people I care about,” she decides, and Indra must be satisfied with the answer.

“And what is it you want to  _be_?”

Octavia has had to get used to not being able to look at her questioner, and it still throws her off, not being able to turn to the speaker, for context. But for now she’ll take the question for face value, and wonder.

Her grin turns vicious within moments, and Octavia doesn’t have to see herself in a mirror know she looks scary. The girls with sharp teeth always do. The ones with the devil in them.

“I want to be the new devil of Hell’s Kitchen,” she says, tipping her head back. “I want to be the only demon on these streets.”

She doesn’t need echolocation, to know Indra’s smiling. 

“Perfect _,_ ” she says, tossing a pair of what feels like boxing gloves at Octavia’s chest. She doesn’t catch them in time, and has to bend and flail for a moment, feeling along the soft matted floor, searching for them. Indra lets her slide the gloves on and settle into a loose position, feet shoulder-width apart, shoulders back, stomach tense. 

“Let’s begin,” Indra says, and strikes out with her cane like a baseball bat.

 

On Octavia’s first day back after her accident, she expects a lot more attention than she gets—people asking questions, people offering condolences, people offering to carry her books like they did the week after her mom died. But instead there are just a lot of whispers in the hall, and scurrying to get out of her way or hold the doors open for her. The nuns must have made an announcement while she was gone; they’re not hit-your-knuckles-with-a-yardstick strict, but they can be intimidating enough when they want to be. No one wants to get stuck in lunch detention with Sister Margarete for an hour. All she ever does is talk about her pugs.

Octavia’s always been on the popular side of her class, with enough general friends to never have to eat alone, but no one close enough to really consider family. When she first moved in with her brother, and he started picking her up after school, she saw a sudden surge of popularity. It was hard to find a classmate that _didn’t_ think Bellamy was hot, with his leather jacket and cigarettes and constant black eyes. They wanted to know all about the fights, all about how he got this or that scar, all about the mobsters he sometimes worked for under the table, taking a fall in an early round, or a fight he knew he couldn’t win even if he tried for it.

Some of them even started swinging by the gym, hoping to see him in action, or catch him without a shirt. Octavia had a sleepover for her fourteenth birthday, and Bellamy let her invite some friends. They watched a scary movie marathon on TV, and the other girls kept trying to sneak peeks at Bellamy when they thought he was asleep.

But no one’s even mentioned her brother today, mostly choosing instead to give Octavia a wide berth completely, probably because they don’t know what to say. She gets it; she wouldn’t know what to say to her, either.

“Your buttons are uneven,” someone says to the right of her, making her jump. They’re still settling into Algebra class, and the second bell hasn’t even rung yet. She recognizes the voice, but it still takes her a minute to place it. Everything is just so _loud_ , that it’s hard for her to focus on just one sound.

“Monty?”

There’s a smile in his voice, clearly pleased that she knows him. “Yeah, good job. Anyway, the buttons aren’t that noticeable, just one off, but I thought you’d want to know.”

“Thanks,” she says, because she is glad he told her. It’s actually sort of refreshing. She’s sure others have noticed, but didn’t want to hurt her feelings, so they didn’t bring it up.

“You want me to read the board for you?” he offers, and Octavia ducks to hide her smile behind her hair. He doesn’t sound particularly pitying, just matter of fact, and anyway, Monty’s always been kind. He tutored her for Geography finals the year before.

“No, that’s okay. The nuns are giving me all the notes on a cassette tape, for each class. Plus I’ve got the textbook on audio, and if all else fails, my brother can help me.”

“Okay, cool,” Monty says and then, a lot less subtly than she’s sure he means to, he says “How is he, anyway? Your brother, I mean.”

This time Octavia doesn’t bother hiding her smile. Monty’s had a crush on Bellamy for forever. “He’s fine. He bought me these cool sunglasses, because my eyes freak everyone out.”

“Nice,” Jasper Jordan says, crashing into the seat on her other side, right as the second bell rings. “Hey, way to leave me behind, buddy.”

“You were taking too long in the bathroom,” Monty says, laughing around the edges, and Octavia doesn’t need to see to know Jasper’s rolling his eyes outrageously.

“You know I have shy urination syndrome!” Jasper says, and then turns to Octavia; she can tell from the angle of his voice. “Can we see your eyes?”

“ _Jasper_ ,” Monty hisses, but Octavia just waves him off. The guys at the gym all say her eyes look “sick as hell,” and if she can’t admire them herself, someone ought to be able to.

She slips off the sunglasses her brother got her, that apparently look like the ones from _Men In Black_ , and listens to the boys gasp on either side of her.

“ _Dude_ ,” Jasper breathes, and Octavia grins. “They look like those cloudy marbles.”

“Or Storm’s eyes, from _X-Men_ ,” Monty adds, and Sister Agatha shushes them from the front of the room.

 

“How was your first day back?” Bellamy asks, sliding Octavia’s bag off her shoulder and onto his own. He holds her arm on their way down the stairs, even though she’s gotten the hang of stairs already. She knows it makes him feel better, being able to hold her up.

“Good,” she says, and she even means it. “Do you have a cassette player I can borrow? The nuns don’t have any technology beyond 1985.”

“What, and you think I do? How old do you think I am?”

“Sixty,” Octavia guesses, and he pinches her side in protest.

“You’re such a brat,” he grumbles, and then ruins it by adding “But I do have a boom box you can use.” Octavia laughs at him the whole way home.

 

She trains with Indra every afternoon, sometimes twice a day on weekends, when her brother isn’t making her hit the books and study for the PSAT. Sometimes they use weapons—sometimes heavy bamboo canes that Indra brings, sometimes the dummy knives and nunchucks stolen from the Krav Maga dojo down the road. Sometimes they train in the gym, while her brother and the other fighters watch, offering comments or advice or low whistles, depending. Other times, Indra leads her through the city, taking the subway to an empty warehouse that smells like dust and stale blood, or a patch of hidden grass in Central Park, where only the pigeons and homeless can see them. And sometimes Indra takes her out for ice cream at the vendor bus shaped like a pirate ship, and has her sit down on the bench there, and tell her what she sees.

Octavia likes that last part the least.

“I can’t _see_ _anything_ ,” she grumbles, for the fifth time, but Indra just hits her on the shin with her cane. Not enough to bruise, but it still hurts, and Octavia winces.

“Don’t focus on seeing with your eyes,” she barks. “See with your other senses. Your ears, your nose, your taste buds, your hands. See with your _mind_.”

“I thought you were supposed to teach me to fight,” O barks back, irritated with herself more than anything. She _knows_ what Indra’s talking about—the bursts of blurred pictures that happen sometimes, flashing across Octavia’s mind so she knows that the person beside her is wearing a cowboy hat and spurs on his boots, or that there’s a woman with a stroller a few yards away, the baby asleep safely inside. But she doesn’t know how to concentrate and control them, doesn’t know how to make them anything but bits and pieces of a bigger picture she can’t see.

“Never mind that,” Indra sighs, and takes a lick of her own ice cream. She only ever gets the fruit sorbet. “Tell me what you learned about in class today.”

“The usual—chemical equations I’ll never use, grammar stuff I’ll never use, how to measure a triangle, which I will _definitely_ never use. And in art, we learned about negative space.”

“Tell me about that,” Indra says. “Negative space.”

Octavia shrugs, used to Indra’s weird methods by now. Once, she had Octavia take her through the entire French Revolution, only to say “And that’s why wars must be fought by just one person. Not a mob, and not an army.” Indra likes to turn Octavia’s homework into morals, like some fucked up version of Aesop’s Fables.

“Um, it’s basically like—you make a picture, but only out of the things _around_ it. Instead of drawing the lines yourself, you let the background form the silhouette, or whatever.”

“So it’s a subject seen from an outside perspective,” Indra decides, and Octavia can’t help but roll her eyes, because she sees where this is going. “Now apply that to your sight.”

“I don’t think it works like that,” Octavia says, but she’s closing her eyes anyway. Not because it helps her see; it’s just habit.

She sees the silhouettes all around her, sees the shadows of clouds up above, hears the ring of the ship bell attached to the bus, hears the baby sniffle in its sleep as the mother turns the page of her book, smells the mint chocolate chip sprinkles on an ice cream cone twelve feet away, smells the overpowering Axe body spray on a thirteen year old boy out on his first date, nervous about his sweating. Octavia opens her eyes and sees the world on fire.

She goes to Homecoming with Monty and Jasper, but stays home from Prom. She’s invited, but that week’s a bad week—everything is too much again, and all of her usual techniques for tuning it out aren’t working. She and Bellamy spend the weekend camped out in the living room, watching old reruns of _The Adam’s Family_ —well, Octavia listens to them—and eating all the marshmallows from the box of Lucky Charms.

She falls asleep on her brother’s shoulder, and it still feels a little funny from when he dislocated it a few weeks before, but he’s warm and he’s Bellamy, and he makes everything better, even if he always smells like smoke. She’s taken to hiding his cigarettes in the freezer, in the hopes that he might quit. He’s up to two packs a day, and she’s heard about the effects of black lung in her health class.

Bellamy gets annoyed when he has to go looking for them, rooting through the frozen peas and beef patties and popsicles, but he never yells at her. Just rolls his eyes when she starts leaving out the brochures about lung cancer out on the counter. He says “It’ll take more than that to kill a Blake, you know that.” He grins around a cigarette as he lights it on the gas stove, not wanting to waste a matchstick, even though he always has a little box in his pocket. Collects them from motels and bars and strip clubs where he fights in the courtyards and back rooms. “Hell didn’t want us, remember? So we came upstairs.”

It’s a running joke between the locals, now that he and Octavia are both known for their fists. _Those Blake devils, back at it again_. _Someone better go warn Aurora in Heaven; her demons are loose._ It’s a good joke. Everyone laughs.

And if sometimes Octavia thinks they might be right, she never says so. Just keeps it to herself, with the rage inside her fingertips. She makes sure to only let it out in the ring.

 

Octavia turns eighteen on a Wednesday in January. She goes to school, and lets her classmates sing the song, smiles when the nuns bring out a pound cake that tastes like wax from the candles. She walks home with her friends—Harper, Zoe, Monty and Jasper. They make cupcakes from some box mix on sale at Kroger’s, and use way too much grenadine for the frosting, leaving their fingers and mouths pink and sticky. She leaves the pans to soak in the sink. Bellamy will have a fit when he gets home and sees them, she knows, but it’s her birthday and she doesn’t feel like washing dishes right then.

She heads to train with Indra at the gym, because she know Indra won’t care what day it is; she’ll expect to see Octavia at four o’clock sharp.

But when Octavia gets there, there’s no tell-tale sound of Indra’s cane, tapping against the floor as she waits. She doesn’t smell the usual combination of chlorine, sweat, and cucumber-scented body wash. Two people are sparring on the mats, but neither of them are Indra. Octavia waits awkwardly off to the side, and when they call for a water break, one of them jogs over to her. She can tell from the erratic heartbeat that it’s Dax. His heart always sounds like he’s waiting to get caught in a lie.

“Hey, your Obi Wan left you this,” he says, taking Octavia by the wrist so he can put something in her hand. It feels like a card, tucked inside an envelope.

“Thanks,” she offers, awkward. It’s the first time she’s ever felt out of place in the gym, and she hates it. She knows this place like the back of her hand; it’s been a second home to her for years, was one of the only places she could go without feeling like she was being pitied, or stared at, or judged. She feels Dax shrug, disrupting the dust in the air around them. She’s getting better at the negative space.

She waits to open the envelope when she gets home, safely tucked into bed, with one of her braille textbooks open beside her, so she can pretend to be studying when Bellamy shows up.

Indra wrote hard enough to leave indentations in the cardstock, and so that’s what Octavia reads.

_Hey kid, happy birthday. You’re not a kid anymore, and there’s nothing left for me to teach you. The world is made up of angles, and only you can decide which one to see it from. Take care of yourself, and the people you care about. You can do that, now._

_It was nice knowing you, little devil._

_-I_

“Maybe she found a treasure map and went to search for the fountain of youth,” Bellamy suggests, when Octavia shows him the letter.

“And maybe she retired to work as a bouncer at some club in Miami,” Octavia says, not bothering to hide her own bitterness. She should have expected it, really. Everyone always leaves, in the end.

“Well, who needs the old bat, anyway?” Bellamy falls down on the couch beside her, lifting up her legs and letting them sprawl in his lap. He pats her shin, in comfort. “You’re twice the fighter she was, anyway. I saw you best her at least twice a week, in the ring.”

“Yeah, but she always won the other five,” Octavia points out, but it does still make her feel better. “Whatever; so she left, so what? I’m over it.”

“That’s the spirit,” Bellamy cheers, and gets up to fetch two beers from the fridge. He started letting her drink with him when she was seventeen, on the grounds that he started at fourteen, and anyway if she was going to drink he wanted her to do it with him, at home where he could keep an eye on her.

“How did you know about her, anyway?” she asks, once he opens her drink and hands it to her. The bottle’s still cold.

“She was the gym teacher at the school, when I went there,” he says, and she chokes. “I know, I know,” he grins. “It was weird, but she always seemed to know whenever our form was off, or we weren’t doing the exercises correctly. Everyone said it was like she was possessed or something. There was a rumor going around that she wasn’t actually blind at all, and was just trying to collect on disability.”

“How’d you still know where she was? How’d you get in touch with her?”

Bellamy takes a pull from his beer before answering. “Sister Anya, actually.” Sister Anya was the headmistress, and an old friend of their mom’s. “She gave me Indra’s number, after she heard about the accident.”

“Oh,” Octavia thinks about the stern-faced older woman. She’s not sure they’ve ever actually spoken, outside of the incident with the schoolyard fight, all those years ago. And even then, Sister Anya mostly just looked firm and judgmental, while Octavia waited for her brother to show up.

“Yeah,” Bellamy swallows the rest of his beer, and goes to get another. She should probably start worrying about his liver, too. And the fact that he still breathes funny, from that hit to his ribs. “I guess we owe her some thanks, huh? After all, it wasn’t all bad with Indra. I know you liked learning from her.”

“No,” Octavia agrees, quietly, running her hands over the card. “It wasn’t all bad.”

The first vigilante makes the news that week.

Everyone’s calling him Spacewalker, because apparently he can walk on air.

But he can’t walk on water, and after a month of making trouble for the gangs and the mobsters, they fish his body out of the Hudson.

“Just goes to show,” Bellamy shakes his head, when it comes on the morning news. “Shouldn’t go around playing cops and robbers in the real world. That’s how you get shot.”

“They tied a cinder block to his feet,” Octavia muses. “Like _The Soprano’s_.”

“Yeah,” Bellamy agrees, ushering her out the door for school. “Old-school. Weird.”

It’s her senior year, but Bellamy’s getting on her ass about college applications, worried she’s going to slip up like he did, and ruin her life. She keeps taking the brochures from her guidance counselor’s office, and stashing them in Bellamy’s stuff, so maybe he’ll see and consider them. He’s better at that kind of stuff than she is anyway, and Octavia has no interest in anymore school, once she gets her diploma. Twelve years was more than enough for her.

But she can’t get Spacewalker out of her head—there are a few twenty-second videos on Youtube, of him flying, caught on cell phones by teenagers with shaky hands. They’re blurry, and maybe even fake, but. The mystery is real. The body pulled out of the river was real.

Jasper and Monty are obsessed with it all.

“It’s like real life _Watchmen_ ,” Monty says, voice filled with wonder, as he and Jasper desperately comb through the internet, searching for any and all information on their resident dead Superman.

“Statistically, there have to be more than just one,” Jasper adds. “I mean, unless he was an alien or something, like Clark Kent.” He fumbles a little with the fake blood packet he’s working on. He’s recently joined the Drama Club, to impress some Junior girl he likes, and he’s been put in the special effects department, probably because he’s not very good at anything else. Which is just as well; Jasper _loves_ special effects. He’s always got a packet of fake blood on him, that he’s fiddling with. He accidentally popped one in gym class once, and managed to get out of the whole period because the coach thought he’d ruptured something.

“I’m betting mutant gene,” Monty says. “It’s a classic.”

“Mutant gene?” Octavia bites, and apparently that’s all the boys needed, before launching into story after story about genetic experiments, radiation, and people with clairvoyance.

“You mean like psychics?” she asks. “1-800-your-future-is-now?”

Monty hums a little, thinking. “More like, people who see things differently. And because of that, they’re maybe faster, stronger, or more intuitive than the average population. Or maybe they have weird dreams, and see things that later come true. Stuff like that. It’s probably a lot more subtle.”

Octavia tries to swallow, but her throat is suddenly dry. “You mean like, if a blind person could see certain things. Like, silhouettes and stuff, because of the echoes in the space around them?”

Jasper’s voice is placating. “Sure, something like that.”

The boys go back to their digital hunt for Spacewalker, trying to uncover his true identity, but Octavia tunes them out. When she focuses, she can see the outline of them hunched over Monty’s computer, the ketchup stain on Jasper’s sweatshirt, the goggles perched on his head, the pencil tucked behind Monty’s ear and likely forgotten. She can smell Sister Agatha’s perfume, from two dozen feet away. She can smell the needles from the trees outside, through the closed window. She can hear a toilet flushing in the girl’s bathroom down the hall. Another girl is crying in one of the stalls.

Octavia closes her eyes, and the world goes dark again.

She’s walking to the gym with Zoe, when it happens. Zoe’s taken a recent interest in kickboxing, and MMA, so Octavia got Dax to give her a few pointers, each week. They’re walking past the construction site on the way, the one that’s always barren because the union is on strike again. Zoe’s got hold of Octavia’s arm, just in case, and Octavia almost doesn’t hear it.

It’s a little boy, whimpering under one of the bulldozers. He smells like salt and sweat and fear. He’s hiding from somebody.

She hears the scuff of boots in the clay, the sand, a man stopping and turning. No, two men. Three. She hears a fourth heartbeat, breathier than the others. Four men stopping, turning, looking around. Hunting.

“What are you doing?” Zoe asks, as Octavia wrenches her arm away, and marches into the site. She keeps her mind open, can see the blurred shadows of machines looming over her, so she side steps around them, around the holes in the ground, a giant obstacle course, like the labyrinth in her brother’s old Greek stories.

“Octavia!” Zoe calls, and Octavia hears one of the men swear. They’re just a few machines away now; they still can’t see her, but they know someone’s here. She can hear their pulses start to quicken.

She follows the sound of the boy’s breathing, and ducks under the machine where he’s hiding. She can’t see him, but she knows he’s there, and that’s enough. “I’m gonna get you out of here,” she promises.

“Hey!” one of the men starts walking over, and Octavia closes her eyes, focuses on the space around her.

She knows he’s wearing an expensive cologne, knows there’s a box cutter in his hand and he probably knows how to use it, knows his friends aren’t far behind him, with blades of their own, knows there’s a gun somewhere in the area, since she can smell the metal.

She hears the sound of a heavy chain, drifting against the fence from where it’s dangling just a few inches away.

Octavia opens her eyes, and reaches forward, fist closing over rusted metal links.

She breathes in, just like Indra taught her, just like Bellamy taught her before that. She breathes out, feet apart, shoulders loose and ready. The man puts his hand on her arm.

She lets the devil out.

When Octavia comes back to her senses, she’s breathing heavy, leaning up against one of the CAT machines. There’s blood and grit under her fingernails, overpowering her sense of smell. There’s blood in her mouth and when she spits it out, more wells up on her tongue. Her ribs are bruised, and her cheek is throbbing, but none of her bones are broken, and she still has mobility in all four limbs. The chain is still wrapped around one arm, dragging through the sand behind her, and when she focuses, she can see all four men on the ground. She can still hear their hearts beating, their breathing shallow from unconsciousness. She can still hear the little boy’s pulse like a rabbit, under the machine.

She crouches down, grimacing from the ache of it, and reaches for him. “It’s okay,” she whispers. “It’s okay, now. Come on, let’s get you home.”

Zoe’s gone, probably to get help, and Octavia isn’t sure what’ll happen to her, when the cops show up to find one blind girl took out four grown men with a metal chain, but she’s sure it won’t be good. She thinks about Spacewalker, bloated from the water and chained to a cinder block, and Octavia decides she doesn’t want to wait and find out.

She walks the little boy to the nearest police precinct, and waits outside until she sees him go in and up to the first officer he sees, just like she told him to. And then she walks down to the gym.

“What happened?” Bellamy asks immediately when she walks in. He jumps out of the ring and rushes over, putting his hands on her face to inspect the bruise there, moving to look at the scrapes on her legs. “Were you attacked? Were you mugged? What—”

“I fell,” Octavia cuts him off with a self-deprecating smile. “Down some stairs. You know how much of a clutz I can be.”

Bellamy picks up her arm, thumbs at where the chain left indentations in her skin. “Stairs,” he repeats, skeptical, and Octavia just shrugs.

She’ll tell her brother, she will. She tells her brother everything. But she wants it to be on her terms, wants to have time to come up with how to word it, how to explain what it is she barely understands, herself.

The little boy makes the news that night. Octavia listens to the story while Bellamy soaks in a tub filled with ice cubes, after a particularly grueling fight. She’ll go check on him in fifteen minutes, to make sure he doesn’t fall asleep and get hypothermia or something.

Apparently the boy’s the son of some hotel tycoon, worth billions of dollars. He was kidnapped from the park when his nanny wasn’t looking, and being held for ransom. The police found all four kidnappers knocked out in the construction site, and the little boy told them it was his guardian angel. Octavia tries not to laugh.

She goes to school the next day, and when people ask about the bruises, she tells them what she told her brother. She can hear Zoe’s heartbeat speed up when she walks by, before she turns away. She’s scared of her. She must have seen Octavia with the chain, before she called the cops and ran.

Octavia holds her breath the whole day, waiting to find out that Zoe told someone else, or maybe the little boy ID’d her picture, or maybe there was another witness she didn’t notice. But the world seems relatively unchanged. She goes to class, she eats lunch with Jasper and Monty, she goes to the gym, she watches her brother fight in some parking garage, she half-drags him home after.

“O, I’m sorry,” he mumbles, when she finishes stitching him up. She’s running a soapy washcloth over his hands, trying to get all the blood off him. Most of it isn’t even his. She can smell the difference between blood types.

“For what?” she frowns, nudging him towards the couch. She tucks him in under an old quilt that smells like mothballs. The couple upstairs is at it again, but she pretends not to hear them.

“’M sorry I didn’t take care of you better,” he says, miserable, and Octavia puts her hand over his mouth, to shush him.

“You took care of me fine,” she whispers, and when he goes to argue, she cuts him off. “You’re the best brother _and_ parent in the world, okay? I wouldn’t want anyone else to have raised me. Not ever.”

Bellamy sighs, pulls her in by her neck, and breathes into her hair. She knows it must hurt his nose, which is still recently broken, but he doesn’t say anything about it and so neither does she. It’s been a while since she got to just be _held_ by her brother. It’s nice.

He thumbs at the St. Nicholas pendant that hangs around her neck, and pulls back to look at it. He gives it a firm tug.

“If you were still wearing this, maybe you wouldn’t be so fucked up right now,” Octavia muses, and Bellamy laughs.

“Nah,” he lets go of the necklace and she knows he’s giving his trademark crooked grin. She’s not sure his smiles will ever be straight again, not after he’s taken so many hits to the jaw. It’s just as well; the crookedness probably suits him. “I’m glad I gave that to you. Everyday, I’m glad.” She knows he’s looking at the bruise on her cheek. They probably match now.

“Me too,” she agrees, giving his blanket one last tug. “Sleep tight, Bell.”

“’M supposed to be the one saying that to you,” he mumbles, words slurred by exhaustion, and Octavia combs the hair back from his face, like he does when she’s got a fever.

“We take care of each other, remember? Get some sleep, big brother.”

She waits for two minutes, until she hears his breathing start to even, before she changes into her training clothes--a pair of black spandex leggings, and a black Underarmor shirt. She wraps both hands, wrists and fingers, in the athletic tape that Bellamy wears under his gloves. She has an old, extra-long scarf made out of some soft hybrid material, and she ties that around her face, with her hair tucked up under it, tugging it down over the tip of her nose, so she can still breathe. She doesn’t bother with cutting eye holes through it. She wears the old black Army boots that she bought for a quarter at the Goodwill, back when she was really into _Resident Evil_. They have steel plates in the toes, good for breaking ribs with.

She presses St. Nicholas to her mouth, and whispers the prayer she’s had memorized since she was eight years old, and took her first Communion.

There are no prayers for boxers, she knows, but she’s been learning Latin since Kindergarten. She and Bellamy used to speak it together as kids, so their neighbors wouldn’t know what they were saying, and they came up with a mini-prayer to whisper, each time one of them stepped in the ring. “ _Percute pro nobis. Amen_.” Bellamy was right; it does feel good, to have a ritual.

Octavia slips out the back door, through the yard and over the fence, into the night.

She doesn’t get far before she finds a fight. Some gang bangers beating a dog in an alleyway. Octavia lives in Sky Crew territory, but Hell’s Kitchen has so many different crews that it’s not hard for one of them to overlap the others, which usually sparks an impromptu gun fight. These kids, no older than her brother, are wearing Boat Crew colors, which is a bit of a surprise. They usually stay close to the docks, they don’t come this far inland.

But Octavia has no interest in gangster politics. Maybe they wanted to hit up a strip club, or something, she doesn’t know. What she does know is that they’re beating a dog, and she likes dogs.

“Hey,” she calls, and the sounds of the beating, their stomping and the dog’s whimpers, die down. “What do you fuckasses think you’re doing?”

“What’d you say?” asks the first one, and he doesn’t wait for an answer, which is just fine. Octavia wasn’t planning on giving one.

She doesn’t have a chain this time, or any other sort of weapon, but she doesn’t need one--even if it would be more convenient. Maybe she’ll invest in the kind of cane Indra carried, that condensed down to the size of a policeman’s night stick.

She lays the first man out, and even though he got a few hits in, and she’s breathing hard, the adrenaline keeps her going. “Who’s next?”

Octavia leaves the bodies, groaning but alive, to sleep it off among the patchwork of piss-stained newspaper and soggy cardboard. She scoops up the dog from where it lies in the mud, and the smell of coppery blood is so overwhelming she has to take a moment to just breathe.

She carries the dog to the nearest shelter, and sits outside with him in her arms. He’s a little too big to be in her lap, but she holds him all the same, and he seems to take comfort in it. He’s still whining, under his breath, and she’s pretty sure one of his legs is broken. She strokes his bloody fur until the air starts to warm up, the first sign of dawn coming. She leaves him just in front of the locked door, so the 8 AM workers will see him first thing, and then she goes home, slipping in through the bedroom window she popped the screen out of earlier.

Octavia leaves her blood-stained clothes in a messy pile on the floor of her closet, and scrubs her jaw with the wet wipes she used to use for her makeup, before sliding into bed like she’d never left.

Her alarm goes off at seven, just like usual, and just like usual, Bellamy knocks on her door fifteen minutes later, to make sure she’s awake. She can’t check herself for marks, but judging by the tenderness of her knuckles and jaw, there’s some bruising. She hopes it’s subtle enough he’ll believe she just fell out of bed.

“Sleep well?” he asks, pouring her cereal, and Octavia nods, hiding her face behind her hair.

“Yeah,” she lies and holds her breath, waiting for him to call her on it. But he just slides the bowl of Chex in front of her, presses a kiss to her hair, and heads into the bathroom.

Octavia spoons each bite into her mouth carefully, flexing her hand beneath the table, so she can feel the ache that reminds her of what she’s done. She feels good, even with the soreness. Better than she has in months, in years, even. She wonders if this is what Indra meant, when she left that letter. When she told Octavia she could protect everyone, now.

She doesn’t make the news until her fifth patrol night, and even then, they get the story wrong.

They’re calling her the guardian angel of Hell’s Kitchen. They’ve put two-and-two together, and know she was the one who helped that little boy. And now she’s successfully laid out a bunch of gang bangers, each group bigger and more violent than the last. They think she’s a man, which makes some annoying amount of sense. They always think the sharp girls are men. And they always think the sharp men are monsters.

This last fight had her slithering in through the window like a snake, breathing sharp because each inhale felt like a dozen daggers to her chest. She had a gash in her thigh that needed stitches, and her head was throbbing so hard she could barely think. Bellamy was at a late-night fight, and wouldn’t be home until at least after sunup, so Octavia filled the tub with ice and sank down, willing the pain to be over.

She didn’t once think about quitting, though. Just got the sewing kit down from the cabinet, and got to work. It took her more than a few tries to thread the needle, and she knew her stitches were way too sloppy, but they did the trick. Sewing was a lot easier when she wasn’t blind.

Octavia wakes up early on Sunday and walks out as Bellamy finishes getting dressed. She knows he’s wearing the only button-down shirt he owns, and his clip-on tie. He still never goes to Mass, but he likes to make confession once a month, just to keep his conscience clear.

“I want to come with you today,” she says, and she knows he’s probably looking at her in surprise. He’s never bothered asking her to come with him; the invitation was always open, but Octavia usually likes to sleep in on the weekends, and he always swings by the church early in the morning, just after the 6 AM service.

“Okay,” he grants. “Sure, come on.”

She wears jeans because she has to wear a skirt every weekday for school, and she’s tired of them. And anyway, the church on the corner is as small and crumbling as everything else on their block; no one there is very strict about the dress code.

Father Kane is a nice enough man. He grew up with their mom, though they were never good friends. They never even particularly liked each other; Kane thought Aurora was too relaxed with her faith, and Auora though Kane was too rigid. But he’s still from Hell’s Kitchen, from their block, and that’s good enough. He’s always treated them decent.

“Forgive me Father, for I have sinned,” Octavia says, the mantra ingrained in her brain, even if she’s only been to the school-mandatory confessions. “It’s been one year since my last confession.”

“That’s quite a while,” Kane says mildly, but not like he’s judging her. Just like an observation.

“I know, sorry. I’ve been--busy.”

Kane hums. “There must be a reason you’re here now,” he says, nudging her towards the right direction. “Something weighing on your shoulders?”

“I--” Octavia blanks for a moment, not sure how to explain herself. She knows that whatever she says won’t leave the confessional, but the words don’t even seem to want to leave her mouth. “I’ve been hurting people. Bad people, but still. Putting them in the hospital. Picking fights.”

“Why do you think they’re bad people?”

“Because they are,” Octavia worries at the skin of her lip until it begins to peel under her teeth. She can taste the blood when she bites too deep. “They’re--gangsters, mostly. A few rapists. Murderers, kidnappers, muggers. People who belong in jail.”

“And you think it’s your job to put them there? By sending them to the hospital?”

“I think someone has to send them a message,” Octavia says, and she hears Kane readjust, leaning closer.

“What message is that?”

“That they can’t just do whatever they want,” she decides, straightening her back more with each word. “That this city isn’t theirs for the taking.”

“And what about you?” Kane asks. “Are you allowed to do whatever you want? To judge others, and carry out their punishment on your own? Is this city _yours_ for the defending?”

“It’s not about what I want, Father. It’s about what the city needs. It needs to be protected, and I can do that.”

“You’re just one girl, Octavia,” Kane sighs, but at least he sounds sorry about it. Like he doesn’t want to be the one to tell her. Like he thinks she doesn’t know her own weaknesses. “Maybe you should leave the protecting to the professionals. The police, the firefighters, the paramedics. You don’t have to carry this all on your own.”

“I’m not. I’m just--helping them. The professionals. They’re too busy to take care of Hell’s Kitchen. They don’t have enough manpower, enough money, enough time. The ER’s are full every night, here. The crime rate’s through the roof. I just--if I can stop it, just a little, shouldn’t I?”

Kane stays quiet, and the moment stretches. Finally, he says “Did you come here to be forgiven, or to be told there’s nothing you have to be forgiven for?”

“I don’t know,” she admits, and then stands. “I’ll come back when I figure it out.”

“I’ll be waiting. For now, ten Hail Mary’s, and maybe reread Matthew 26: 52-54,” he adds, and Octavia leaves the confessional.

She finds the passage when she gets home, in the braille Bible her brother bought her online. _Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?”_ It’s pretty on the nose--but what if she’s the sword sent by God? What if that’s why she can do the thinks she can, why she can fight the way she can? Doesn’t she have an obligation then, to stand up against the evil in this city?

Maybe Kane was right, and she was just looking for a way to excuse what she’s done. Either way, Octavia still dresses up in all black that night, and goes looking for trouble. If what she’s doing is wrong, then she’s damned already.

And if it isn’t, well. She’ll keep fighting until both of her hands break.

 

Octavia’s working on her World History project at the gym, when Cage Wallace shows up.

“I’m looking for the older Blake,” he says, and he’s clear across the room, but she can hear him perfectly. His sidekick, Emerson, is with him, and it’s been years since she’s seen them--not since their fight put Bell in the hospital for a punctured lung--but she can so easily picture what they look like, still. Sleazy. Slimy. Like two ugly snakes wrapped up in the skin of ugly men.

“The old devil of Hell’s Kitchen,” Cage adds, like they don’t know who he’s talking about. Dax goes to fetch Bellamy from the weights room, grumbling about _skinny Irish mobsters_ under his breath.

Bellamy comes stalking out of the back like he owns the room, which is pretty close to the truth. He certainly works here enough, and the old manager, Charles, calls him _son_ a lot. Charles was called Pike the Pitbull back in the day, but now he’s gained some weight and some gray in his beard, and he mostly just shows up once a week to make sure the place is still open.

“Cage,” Bellamy says, like the name’s a bad taste in his mouth, and Octavia gives a vindictive little smile. She remembers when the Irish first approached her brother, back when he was still starry-eyed and new, back when he thought fighting for mobsters would be his ticket to the big leagues. Instead, all it got him was about a dozen hospital bills and a heart murmur that wasn’t there before. She’s glad he’s not getting sucked in by their fancy suits and empty favors, again. “What do you want?”

“Come on, Blake,” Cage says, all fake friendliness. “Is that any way to greet an old pal?”

“We were never pals,” Bellamy points out. “And last I checked, neither of you train, so there’s no reason for you to be standing here right now.”

“We might not train, but we know you still do,” Emerson says. His voice makes Octavia’s scalp itch. “We hear you’re planning to go straight, soon. Taking fights with half the purse that ours can get you.”

“I’m not interested,” Bellamy says, voice bordering on dangerous the way it always does when money’s involved.

“What if the fight we offer is a real one?” Cage asks, and Octavia hears her brother’s heart skip a beat, as her own heart sinks. “Ringside, professional middleweight championship, the whole nine yards. You’ll be up against the Iceman.”

Bellamy’s breath catches, and she knows it’s too late. He’s caught, hook, line and sinker. “Roan Azgeda?” he asks, a little awed in spite of himself. Roan’s the undisputed champ, in the middleweight boxing world. The kind of fights that make the eight o’clock slot on the sports channel.

She hears him lick his lips, the tick in his jaw, his most obvious tell, even as he tries to play hard to get. They know they’ve got him. “What do you want me to do for it?”

“Not a thing,” Cage says. “Except win, of course.”

“You don’t want me to throw the fight,” Bellamy says, skeptical.

“Of course not,” Emerson chastises. “That would be illegal, as you well know.”

Bellamy snorts. “Yeah, I know alright.” He pauses, and she knows he’s glancing over at her, because her brother is the most obvious person in the world. Apparently, the mobsters agree.

“We heard about your kid sister,” Cage says. “Nasty thing. You have our condolences.”

There’s the slide of skin-on-skin as Bellamy crosses both arms. “Thanks.”

“She’s looking right as rain these days though,” Emerson notes, and Octavia grits her teeth against the urge to shout _fuck you!_ and give herself away. “And you’ll have more than enough time to have kids of your own. You’ve still got your youth, your health. Your sister’s close to graduation age, isn’t she? Won’t be long until she’s moving out on her own.”

“Plus, there’s college fees to think of,” Cage agrees, and Octavia wants to march over and get in his face so he can hear her scream better. She doesn’t want her brother to take the fight at all, let alone take it for _her_. She’s so tired of being the reason Bellamy tears himself apart each day. “And those blind books can’t be cheap.”

She can hear Bellamy’s teeth grinding as he holds his words back. She wishes he wouldn’t. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Fine. Let me know the time.”

She hears Cage’s grin, and the sound of it sends a shudder down her spine. She hates how pleased his voice is. “Will do, Blake. Time for you to take back your horns.”

Bellamy sighs and crosses over to where Octavia’s holed up on the bleachers, and she goes back to pretending to study, even as he climbs up to sit down beside her.

“How much of that did you hear?” he asks, and then adds “Don’t bother lying. I know your hearing is better than good these days.”

Octavia chews at her lip, before giving in. “All of it.”

She can feel him bobbing his head. “I figured.” He’s fidgeting, which means he’s nervous, though she’s not sure if it’s about the fight, or about her. “I’m not gonna ask you to tell me what’s going on with you,” he starts, and her chest aches from the secrets inside it. “I know you’ll tell me when you’re ready. But I want you to know--if anything ever happens to me, anything at all, it’s not on you. Okay? It’s on me. My choices are mine, and so are the consequences.”

It sounds like the kind of thing he might say, if he thought he might be dying. Octavia tries to swallow, but her voice still comes out shaky, and sticky with fear. “I thought you said it’d take more than a fight, to take you down?”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “But this might be more than a fight, O. Just--promise me you won’t blame yourself, alright? No matter what happens.”

“I can’t,” she admits. “Self-blame runs in the family, you know that.”

Bellamy barks out a laugh, swinging an arm out to pull her in. He’s still sweaty, and smells like a jock strap, but Octavia leans against him anyway, just holding her breath. “Yeah,” he agrees, quiet. “I know that.”

 

There’s another vigilante in Hell’s Kitchen, and Octavia runs into her that night.

She should have expected it, really; it’s not like she was the first, after all. Others were bound to have the same idea, when Spacewalker first made the headlines.

They’re calling this one the Commander, because she always hits her mark with military-like precision, and she wears a light, flexible body armor that means Octavia’s steel-toe boots do almost nothing.

She runs into her on the roof of an apartment building--not hers, this one’s in Tri Crew territory. Octavia heard a scream from some blocks away, and she wanted to get a better vantage point so she could hone in on it, and follow the sound.

But when she gets there, someone’s already standing on the ledge. Octavia can’t see her too clearly--just a blurred figure, with long hair swept back in a braid, and two trident-shaped weapons, one in each hand.

“You are the guardian angel of Hell’s Kitchen?” the Commander asks, and Octavia bites back a wry grin. A thrill shoots through her at the sound of the woman’s accent; this is the first person like her that she’s ever met. She has a lot of questions.

“Depends on who you ask,” Octavia shrugs. “Some people call me a demon.”

“And you?” she asks, mild. “What do you call yourself?”

Octavia shrugs again. “I’m just me.”

“I see,” the Commander muses, and then throws a blade at Octavia’s head. She barely manages to duck in time, and dodge the kick that the vigilante sends her way, scurrying back while trying to keep her balance.

“What the fuck,” she spits, dodging again, before landing a blow of her own at the woman’s solar plexus--it does nothing but bounce off her body armor, and Octavia falls back.

“This city has no need for little girls and half-measures,” the Commander says, and she isn’t even out of breath. “It needs someone who is willing to go the distance, and finish the job.”

“You mean murder,” Octavia growls, rushing forward. The Commander parries easily, but Octavia manages to strike a left hook across her face. It bruises her knuckles a little, but she knows it hurt the other woman more.

“I mean _execution_ ,” the Commander corrects, and lunges at her.

For the first time since Indra left, Octavia is losing a fight. Before it’s even finished, she knows she’ll lose. They’ll fish her body out of the water, just like Spacewalker, and Bellamy will be left all alone. It’s that thought that keeps her moving, even when it hurts to breathe, hurts to stand and swing her arms, propelling herself through the air with a hook kick to the Commander’s jugular. She holds her own, sure, but most of her fights have been against thugs with baseball bats and a Napoleon complex. This woman is trained, and trained _well_. Octavia’s no match for her.

She finds herself on her back, coughing up blood from where the Commander stabbed her in the side, between her ribs, but she’s pretty sure she didn’t hit a major organ. Her biggest threat is blood loss.

The Commander leans in low, wet lips brushing Octavia’s ear. “I will let you live this time,” she tells her. “If I see you again, I will slit your throat. Go home, little demon.”

Then she’s gone.

Octavia isn’t sure how she manages to get herself moving again, walking sluggishly through the streets, not even bothering to take the back alleys like she usually does, to avoid being seen. She keeps a hand pressed over the gash in her side, still pumping blood out along her skin and soaking through the skin of her shirt. She’s seen enough hospital soap operas to know that putting pressure on the wound is necessary.

She’s barely made it past the Sky Crew border, before she collapses. She needs to take cover, she knows, but her home is too far, and she doesn’t know the city well enough to know a good hiding place nearby. So she ducks into the first side street she sees, around the corner of a soot-stained building, and she ducks down behind the dumpster there, leaning her head back against the brick. Her mouth is still filled with her own blood, and she swallows it back down. She’ll just take a break and rest, get her strength back before heading out again. Once she gets home, she can tell Bellamy she was mugged or something, and he’ll take her to the hospital.

She’ll just drift off for a few minutes, and then she’ll be home.

 

When Octavia wakes up, it’s to the sound of two hushed voices arguing above her. The feel of the cold brick is gone from behind her, replaced by what might be a couch. Everything hurts, but there’s no blood welling up in her mouth, which seems like a good sign.

The scarf is gone from her face, which means someone had to have taken it off. They know what she looks like.

The two voices are female, both sounding frantic and annoyed.

“We’re not going through this again,” the first one says. “You remember what happened to Finn? Remember _Lexa_? We both said we were done with the superhero bullshit, Clarke.”

“I know, I know,” the second voice--Clarke--soothes, placating. “But what was I supposed to do, Raven? I couldn’t just _leave_ her there to die.”

“Sure you could’ve,” Raven grumbles, but it sounds half-hearted at best. She heaves a ragged sigh, ripe with exhaustion, and Octavia feels a pang of guilt. Whoever these women are, they clearly saved her, which has probably put them in danger. She doesn’t know if the Commander followed her, and is watching the building. All the crews have a bounty out on her head for causing so much trouble, ten grand for the demon of Hell’s Kitchen. The police want her too; vigilantism is still illegal, after all. These women have to know that. They have to know the risks.

Or maybe the reward was worth it, to them. Maybe they called 911, or the mob, and are just waiting to collect their money.

Either way, Octavia needs to leave. Her brother’s probably already out looking for her, going crazy with worry. She can’t tell what time it is, and when she tries to speak, her voice is hoarse.

“How long was I out?”

All at once, someone is rushing over, latex covered hands poking and prodding Octavia’s skin so she groans. “How are you feeling? Do you know your name? What year is it?”

“I feel like shit,” Octavia says. “You don’t need to know my name. It’s 2016, year of the monkey.”

“Oh good, you’re a comedian,” the second voice snarks, from across the room.

“You’ve lost a lot of blood,” the first woman, whom Octavia’s beginning to think must be a doctor, since she has a stethoscope handy, tells her. “You shouldn’t be moving yet. I did what I could for the gash in your side, but you’ve been stabbed, and you should definitely get some x-rays done, to make sure there’s no internal damage.”

“No,” Octavia says, sounding a lot firmer than she feels. “Not like this.”

“Yeah, what happened? Did you fail your _American Ninja Warrior_ audition?”

 _“Raven_ ,” the doctor chastises. So she must be Clarke. “Your eyes aren’t responsive at all,” she murmurs. “And you don’t seem worried about the fact that you can’t see.”

“That’s what happens when you go blind,” Octavia says, dry. “Look, I appreciate all you’ve done for me, but I really need to get going. What time is it?”

“Almost five in the morning,” Raven says, and Octavia can’t help but sigh, relieved. Her brother’s still asleep, or maybe he’s taking a smoke break. But he definitely won’t know she’s missing for at least two more hours, and that’s something.

“What you really need to do is lie down and rest, let your body start to heal,” Clarke argues, and she’s _definitely_ a doctor, every inch no-nonsense.

“If she wants to go, let her go,” Raven says. “Clearly she’s got somewhere better to be.”

Octavia glares in her general direction. She doesn’t appreciate the bite to her tone. These women don’t know her; they don’t get to judge who she is or what she’s doing. They have no idea.

“At least let us drive you wherever it is you need to go,” Clarke offers, ignoring the indignant sound Raven lets out.

“You have a car in New York City?”

“No,” Clarke admits. “But Raven does.”  
“No way,” Raven declares. “She’ll get blood all over the seats!”

There’s a long stretch of silence, and Octavia knows they’re probably arguing wordlessly, the way she and Bellamy used to, before she lost her sight. Finally, Clarke claps both hands in tight, forced cheer. “Alright, let’s go.” She helps Octavia sit up, and O bites back a scream the whole time. It feels like all of her insides are grating against each other, each time she moves.

Clarke’s got her half off the couch, when Raven decides to come over and help, taking Octavia’s other arm and pulling it across her shoulders. There’s the sound of creaking metal each time she steps, and Octavia realizes it’s because she’s got a leg brace.

It’s slow going down the stairs; their apartment is near the top of the building, and there is no elevator. Each step is agony for Octavia, and she throws up twice from the pain. She mumbles an apology each time, but Clarke just tells her not to worry about it, and wipes at her mouth with her sleeve. Raven says nothing at all.

The car that they bring her to feels expensive, and classic, like something out of a film noir. Raven fusses around the back seat, pulling an old blanket that smells like cat pee from the trunk and laying it out on the leather, before letting Octavia crawl inside.

“What’s your address?” Clarke asks, setting up some sort of navigational app, but Octavia shakes her head. They’ve already seen her face, and poked around her body; they don’t need to know where she lives, too.

“How far into Sky Crew are we?”

“We’re right inside the Box,” Raven says. The Box is the few dozen blocks where the more prominent Sky Crew members live. The Blake’s apartment is across town, at the opposite border.

“Just keep driving towards the yards, until I say when.”

Octavia keeps her eyes closed for the ride, face pressed right up against the door so she can hear the world outside. She waits until she hears the bells of St. Patrick’s, and then calls out for them to stop.

“Here’s good,” she says, fumbling with the door handle. Clarke reaches back to help her, and Octavia stumbles out onto the sidewalk.

“Are you sure?” Clarke asks, sounding skeptical, but Octavia just waves her off. “How do you know this is the place?”

“Corner of West 35th, right?” Octavia asks, pointing a hand towards the coffee vendor down the way. “Macallan roasts his beans differently. I can smell them.” She nods towards the church. “St. Patrick’s bells are one half second off from the north cathedrals.” She starts down the road. “And my neighbors have a German Shepherd with a wonky bark, because he swallowed a squeaky toy. He started going nuts when we drove by.”

There’s a frown in Clarke’s voice. “I didn’t hear anything.”

“That’s because you weren’t listening,” Octavia says, only a little smug. “Thanks again for the ride. You should probably forget you ever saw me.”

She heaves herself in through the window, and just lies on the floor for a minute, trying to breathe. She checks the neat stitches on her side, professional and neat, unbroken. Small thanks for small miracles.

She meditates for the next hour, just like Indra taught her, to help heal her mind and body. She’s not so sure about her mind, but she does feel a little better physically, when she’s finished. She’s still in no shape to fight anytime soon, but at least now she can take a step without wanting to die.

“What the fuck happened to you?” Bellamy asks, when she shuffles out for breakfast. He hasn’t seen her since yesterday morning.

“Flag football in gym,” Octavia says, grimacing a little as she sits down. “I went a little overboard.”

“They let the blind girl play football.” Bellamy sounds skeptical as he puts a plate of poptarts in front of her. Strawberry and sprinkles, toasted just the way she likes.

Octavia shrugs and takes a bite. “Sister Phyllis didn’t want me to feel left out.” She fumbles for the remote they always leave on the table, and switches on the television, to the news.”

“You’re awfully concerned with current events, lately,” Bellamy muses, prodding only a little. Honestly, she’s surprised it’s taken him this long to start fishing. Her brother is sort of a busy-body.

“It’s for my government class,” she explains, and then shushes him, trying to hear.

Apparently the Commander struck again last night, taking out an entire bar of Russian mobsters at some fancy dinner party in the middle of town. No pedestrians were harmed, and no criminals were left standing. It was a bloodbath, if the footage is anything to go by. A massacre. Octavia swallows down the rest of her breakfast, even though she’s suddenly lost her appetite, and walks to school.

Monty and Jasper are already talking about it, when she slides into her seat.

“Dude, I’m telling you, this place is superhero central, right now,” Monty says. He’s been excited about the vigilantes for months; he’s started a blog, tracking the whereabouts and sightings of each one, speculating on their true identities and super powers, if they have any. Spacewalker has sparked some sort of movement, and now the whole city has superhero fever.

“I know, I know,” Jasper agrees, equally enthusiastic. “I just can’t tell if it’s more a _Watchmen_ vibe, or _X-Men_ , you know? What do you think, Octavia?”

“ _Avengers_ ,” she decides. “Trying to keep people safe.”

“Okay but the real question is, which vigilante’s the coolest?” Jasper grins. “I’m definitely going with the Commander. I mean, the costume alone is badass.”

Octavia goes tense at the name, and wills herself to relax a little. Beside her, Monty scoffs.

“No way. The Commander’s way too harsh, too black and white, you know? She doesn’t have the superhero moral compass. I’m with the guardian angel.” Octavia feels a surge of affection for her friend, and tries to hide her smile before they can notice.

“Yeah, but the guardian angel just wears some ninja costume from Party City,” Jasper argues. “A hero’s only as good as their costume is.”

“I feel like that’s not true,” Monty says, but the bell rings before they can determine who’s right.

Octavia thinks about the Commander’s body armor, strong enough to bounce all of her blows back at her, but light enough for the Commander to move quickly. It would probably stop a knife, and maybe even bullets. Some armor certainly would have come in handy for Octavia, last night. She can still feel the stitches through her Oxford shirt, and they itch every time she moves a little.

Octavia used to be fairly good with a needle; enough to help her mom, back when she still did alterations for extra cash, out of their living room. Mostly she just got a lot of teenage girls with prom dresses that needed to be hemmed, or readjusted, but sometimes she’d get a particularly creative order, and she’d let Octavia add little threaded butterflies to the sleeves of a jacket, or the hem of a skirt.

But that was before Octavia went blind, and now she can barely even thread a needle, let alone stitch anything with it. Bellamy probably still could, if she asked him, but then he’d want to know what she needed the outfit for. She could maybe use Halloween as an excuse, but she’s not sure he’d buy it, and even if he did, Halloween is months away, so her urgency wouldn’t make any sense.

Maybe she could place an order somewhere. It’s New York City; she’s sure there are places who do that sort of thing. But they’re probably expensive, and they might ask questions. They might hear about her on the news and put two and two together.

No matter how she looks at it, finding a costume that might actually protect her seems like too much of a risk.

It’s three days before Octavia feels fight-ready again, and in that time she can feel the rage for it bubbling up under her skin, with no way to be let out. She needs an outlet, so she heads to the gym after school, knuckles itching for something to grind up against, teeth gritting with the taste for violence. Part of her hates how used to it she’s become, like it’s a drug she needs a fix of. But the rest of her--well.

She’d be lying if she said she didn’t like it.

Dax is training on one of the Bobs when she arrives, grunting out at her in greeting.

“In the mood to spar against someone who hits back?” Octavia asks, just the hint of an edge to her voice. Dax is quiet for a moment, before he scoffs.

“Yeah, no thanks. I’d rather not beat on the blind girl.” He doesn’t mean any harm, some part of her knows that, but it still pisses her the fuck off each time someone underestimates her. She’s fought in this ring before, and won, and they’ve all seen it, whistled and clapped, congratulated her. They should know better, by now.

“Maybe you just don’t want to get beat _by_ the blind girl,” she snarls, goading him, and Dax swears at her, before climbing in through the ropes.

“You asked for this,” he warns her. “Whatever happens--I ain’t sorry. You asked.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. “Remember that.”

Then they fight.

Octavia knows she should be worried when she loses herself in the blood and the crunch of bone and the sound of Dax hitting the mat, hard. She knows she should be worried that she never knows what’s happening until the fight is over, and she’s left standing over the bodies, blood in her mouth that might not be all hers.

Someone’s ringing the bell, sharp and shrill in her ears, so she winces. Someone else is shouting _time! Time, goddammit!_ and lunging in through the ropes, over to Dax, bending to check his pulse. His face is more blood than not, she can smell it.

She can hear the feathery beat of his heart, fragile and weak.

“I asked for this,” she mumbles, voice an echo inside her own head. There’s still a rush of electricity running through her veins that won’t stop; it feels like her blood has turned to neon, like she’s one of those blinking OPEN signs at the twenty-four-hour gas stations.

“O, what the fuck happened?” Bellamy asks, leaning down until they’re eye-level, but Octavia just shakes him off, and backs away. The devil’s still raging around in her skull, in her fists, clenching and unclenching.

What happens if you let the devil loose inside yourself? What if that’s what happened?

She runs out of the room, leaving Bellamy calling out after her as the others try to resuscitate Dax. She burst out the back door, into the alley where they stow all the cracked Bobs and ripped up punching bags, and weights more rusted than not.

Atom’s out there, one of those e-cigarettes in his mouth. She didn’t know he was trying to quit. It smells like blueberries.

“Hey,” he says, all quiet concern. Atom’s always been quiet. He’s older than her, by a couple years, but the boys still call him Baby-Face, and treat him like the runt of the litter. She remembers he was cute, when she last saw him. A whole lot probably hasn’t changed in the last three years. Not for him, anyway. He still smells the same--salt and sweat, and now blueberries. “You okay?”

Octavia nods, and then thinks better of it and shakes her head. She doesn’t say anything.

“Do you need something?” he offers, sounding awkward, not sure what to do.

Octavia steps forward, until the toes of her sneakers press up against his. She can feel his breath on her mouth, and licks her lips. It tastes like blueberries, too. “Distract me?” she asks, barely a whisper, and feels Atom nod.

He slides a hand onto her hip, thumb stroking the skin there, bared by her sports bra. “I can do that.”

Octavia’s kissed a few people before--boys and girls, at parties, at sleepovers, at games of Spin the Bottle and Truth or Dare. She’s let a few hands sneak up her shirt and cup her breasts, or squeeze her ass while they licked at her mouth, but she’s never felt the heat that’s building up in her core now, never felt the sting of pleasure as Atom bites at her neck, groaning when she scratches his back in response. And maybe it’s the devil, still burning its way through her, but at this point she doesn’t care.

She lets Atom fuck her against the back of the gym, swallowing each noise she makes, even as the brick scrapes at the skin of her ass until it’s on fire. At least it does the trick; she loses herself in the feeling, and comes to when Atom pulls out, gingerly helping her back down.

“Thank you,” she says, giving him one last chaste kiss. He makes it sweet, petting her hair down for her, helping her straighten her pants, pressing his mouth to her cheek when they’re finished.

“Did it help?” he asks, when she starts for the door.

Octavia pauses, thinks. She’s still aching, still sore from her fight, still thrumming with war just under her skin. She still hears the sound of her brother asking what happened, like he couldn’t believe what she’d done. “I’ll let you know,” she says, and goes back inside.

She goes hunting for the Commander that night. In the three days she’s been out of commission, the other vigilante has been racking up quite the kill count.

They’re all criminals, the kind of people Octavia goes after herself, but--she never _kills_ them. Murder is still murder, no matter who does the dying. And the Commander’s still a killer.

Octavia’s always been a big fan of the redemption stories. The ones about getting a second chance. The people she goes after, maybe they never learn their lesson. Maybe they get paroled, get back out on the streets and get straight back to killing, raping, beating children and dogs.

But maybe they do learn. Maybe they’re scared straight. Maybe they find God, or science, or whatever it is they need to believe in, to make them turn everything around.

If she stops believing that people deserve a second chance, then what does that mean for her? For her brother?

Octavia doesn’t find the Commander, but she does find a bunch of dealers on 24th, in Ice Crew territory, where all the drug runners live. The area’s rife with heroin and meth, ER’s and jails overflowing with addicts. Twelve blocks that have been all but forgotten by everyone who doesn’t live there; scraps of meat abandoned and left for the dogs to fight over. The kind of criminals that the Commander doesn’t bother herself with. Even she doesn’t care about the people out here.

She takes them all out with a socket wrench, and goes home at first light.

She’s already dressed and waiting by the time Bellamy wakes up, and shrugs on his dress shirt, not bothering with the tie or fixing his bedhead. They walk to the church in sleepy silence, waiting for the early-bird service to end before climbing up the stairs, and slipping inside.

“Forgive me Father for I have sinned,” Octavia says.

“Do you have anything to confess?” Kane asks.

“I have lied, I’ve hurt people, I’ve picked fights, I’ve cursed, I’ve,” Octavia swallows a little. She doesn’t feel any guilt, or any sort of real _change._ She mostly just feels like sex is overrated. “I’ve had sex outside of marriage. But none of that is why I’m here.”

“Why are you here?”

“It’s still murder, if the person you kill is bad, right? It’s still wrong?”

She hears Father Kane release a sigh and cross his legs, getting comfortable in his seat, like he’s preparing to be here for a while. “You really want to test me with all the big questions, don’t you. Yes, murder is still murder, no matter who you kill. Even self defense is murder, although the Lord is more willing to forgive in that case.”

“But what if the person you kill is also a murderer? And killing them would mean keeping others safe?”

“Even so, one man does not have the right to judge another man. That’s what we have the justice system, and juries, for.”

“So if I knew someone was planning to kill someone else, a murderer, I should stop them, right?”

Kane hesitates. “Octavia, what have you gotten yourself mixed up in? Does your brother know?”

“No,” she admits. “It’s safer if nobody knows. Not even you, Father.”

“I see,” he muses. “In that case, no. Your only obligation is to keep yourself safe, and to be the best person you can. Follow your faith.”

Octavia nods and stands. “I am. Any scriptures for me today?”

“Psalm 144,” he answers. “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good.”

Octavia raises her hand to her forehead, her chest, her left and right shoulders, ending it all with a kiss. “For His mercy endures forever.”

She thumbs through her Bible again, searching for the passage, and once she finds it, she reads it out loud. “ _Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle; he is my steadfast love and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield and he in whom I take refuge, who subdues peoples under me.O Lord, what is man that you regard him, or the son of man that you think of him? Man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow. Bow your heavens, O Lord, and come down. Touch the mountains so that they smoke.Flash forth the lightning and scatter them; send out your arrows and rout them. Stretch out your hand from on high; rescue me and deliver me from the many waters, from the hand of foreigners, whose mouths speak lies and whose right hand is a right hand of falsehood._ ”

“Well that sounds ominous,” Bellamy muses, from where he’s leaning in her doorway. She didn’t hear him flick on the light, so he must be watching her in darkness. “Any particular reason you’re going all Doomsday in here?”

“Father Kane told me to read it,” she explains, and she knows he’s making the same face he always makes, when she mentions the priest. Fond exasperation.

“I swear, one of these days we’re gonna find that old man standing out on the sidewalk, with a THIS IS THE END sign or something.” He’s still shaking his head as he walks away, and Octavia runs her hand over the bumps of the passage, again.

_Who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle._

Octavia shuts her book.

 

Octavia’s grades are starting to slip, and Sister Anya calls a meeting with Bellamy, to discuss it.

He sits through the whole thing, silently brewing, but waits until they’re outside, before he explodes.

“I’ve just sat back and let you slip through the cracks,” he starts, cutting her off when she tries to argue. “No, I have. I’m not an idiot, O. I know those bruises aren’t from gym class, or falling down the stairs. You’re _great_ at stairs, Hell you’ve got better reflexes now then you did before you were blind. You think I haven’t noticed the thread going missing? The stitches on your legs that you try to cover up? I didn’t ask questions because I didn’t want to pry, but now it’s affecting your schoolwork, you never hang out with your friends anymore, you’re losing control in the ring. You broke Dax’s nose and gave him a concussion so bad he almost _died_.”

He stops, putting a hand over his face, and Octavia’s never felt lower than she does at this moment. She can’t remember the last time her brother got a good night’s sleep, and she knows she must be part of the reason.

“I think you should go back to counseling,” he decides, and she blurts “ _No_ ,” without really meaning to.

“It didn’t help before and it won’t help now,” she adds, and Bellamy lets out his breath through his nose, like an angry bull. He only does it when he’s really irritated.

“Well, I don’t know what else to do, Octavia. You’ve got to give me something to go on, here.” He stops, pulling her back by the arm. “Let’s start with the bruises. Where are you getting them?”

“A fight club,” Octavia says. It’s at least _close_ to the truth. She has gotten them all from fights, at least.

Bellamy doesn’t believe her. “You’re lying,” he declares. “You always do that lip purse thing, before you lie.”

“It’s safer for you, if you don’t know,” she says, skating as close to the truth as possible, but Bellamy just shakes his head again.

“Nope, no way. Either tell me what’s going on, or I’ll start following you wherever you go. I’ll sleep on your floor if I have to.”

“You’ll fuck up your back,” Octavia snaps.

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take,” he decides, crossing both arms. “I’m waiting.”

Octavia sighs, running a hand through her hair and successfully getting her fingers tangled up in the knots. Bellamy reaches out to gently undo it, and she feels the last of her resolve break. This is her _brother_. He’s always been honest with her, and he deserves to know. She’s already kept too much from him, for too long.

“You know that--vigilante? The one all over the news? The guardian angel of Hell’s Kitchen?”

She can hear the grim frown in his voice. “O are you seriously dating a vigilante?”

Octavia barks out a surprised laugh. “No, no, I’m--I _am_ the vigilante, Bell.”

A moment stretches between them. And then, “Bullshit.”

“It’s true,” she says, a little indignant in spite of herself. She’s just so _tired_ of being underestimated.

“How?” Bellamy breathes, sounding awed, and she has to admit, that’s sort of a confidence boost. Her brother has always been the person she admires most, so for him to be in awe of _her_ \--well, it’s a nice turn of events, that’s all.

“Indra taught me to see things in a different way. Using negative space.”

“Wait, you can _see_?”

Octavia shrugs a little. “It’s...complicated. I don’t see things the way you do, or the way I used to. But yeah, I can see. In a way.”

“Prove it. How many fingers am I holding up?”

Octavia focuses her thoughts on the air around Bellamy’s hand. “Two. Now four. Now--you can’t hold it up halfway, Bellamy, that’s cheating.”

“Jesus fuck,” Bellamy says, breathless. “You can _see_.”

“Kind of,” she corrects, because it really _isn’t_ the same. She sees with her other senses, not with her eyes. She wishes there was another word for it, other than sight. One that was more accurate.

“And you’re seriously the vigilante?” he asks. “ _Seriously_?”

“Yeah,” she tells him, and they start walking home again. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“I get why you didn’t,” he says, sounding mild, and he’s definitely taking everything a lot better than she was expecting.

“Really?”

“Oh, you’re definitely grounded, for like, _life_. But yeah, I get why you didn’t say anything.”

“Bell, I can’t be grounded. I have a nemesis I have to take down.”

She can feel Bellamy studying her, but keeps her face impassive. “I can’t decide if you’re making that up or not. But regardless, your nemesis will just have to wait until your next report card. If your grades are back up by then, you can start being a vigilante again. On _weekends_.”

Octavia glowers. “Maybe I’ll just turn invisible and sneak out through the walls,” she says, and Bellamy jumps a little, turning to stare at her.

“Shut up, you cannot.” He eyes her until she breaks, and cracks a smile. He shoves her, just a little, and lets out a laugh. “You’re such a brat, _god_.”

“A brat with super powers,” she gloats, and he pushes her through the door.

“Yeah, yeah, go do your homework, Kim Possible. _Jesus_ , I can’t believe this. My own sister’s a superhero and didn’t even tell me.”

“I’m telling you _now_ ,” she protests, and suddenly she can’t remember why she thought it wouldn’t be a good idea to tell her brother.

He makes hot chocolate on the stove, like their mom used to when they were little and wanted to go play in the park. They always wanted to go early in the morning, when the moon and the sun were out at the same time and they could still just barely see the stars. Aurora would make hot chocolate on the stove and pour it into a tall metal thermos, sending it with them. They’d take turns drinking from it, while perched on top of the tallest slide, staring up at the sky for hours.

They order Chinese food for dinner, because Bellamy doesn’t feel like cooking and he still has some extra cash from his last training gig, and he cycles through all the female superheroes he knows, until Octavia throws a crab rangoon at his face. He just picks it up good naturedly, and pops it in his mouth.

“Thanks, Wanda Maximoff,” he says, and she pokes him with her chopstick.

 

Bellamy makes good on his promise to ground her. He finds the screen she popped out of the window and stashed in the backyard, and he puts it back in place, nailing the window shut for good measure. “You were right,” he explains, when she catches him hammering it. “I really don’t want to sleep on your floor.”

Octavia knows he’s doing it to protect her, but it still makes her blood simmer, being cooped up like this. She knows lots of kids get grounded, over little things even. Monty’s mom grounds him every time he gets a B on a test. Octavia’s never been grounded before in her life, and she’s definitely earned this one, so she knows she shouldn’t complain. But it’s still a fucking annoyance.

At least he still lets her go to the gym, if only so he can keep an eye on her. It still gives her an outlet, and she’s grateful for that, even if she can feel the others staring at her each time she walks in. She’s taken to working the speed bags more than anything, off in the secluded back corner. They weren’t able to scrub all of Dax’s blood from the mat, and she can still smell it.

The one positive thing that comes out of her punishment, is her GPA. She goes from a C- average, up to a borderline A within two weeks. Her best class is definitely art, which doesn’t make much sense, but it’s true. Mostly she just paints or draws a bunch of lines across the paper, making a mess of it all, and then claims it’s some abstract concept. Sister Beatrice eats it up. Plus, failing a blind girl because she can’t see what she’s making, seems a little bit cruel.

“Hey Octavia, think your brother will let you off the hook this Friday?” Monty asks when she sits down beside him. He helps her slide her bag over, to make room.

“What for?”

“Sociology project,” Jasper whispers from two rows away. Sister Allison moved him in the hopes it would get them to stop talking in class. So far, it’s just meant they have to talk a little louder. “We have to study a group of people, and take notes on it.”

“Okay,” Octavia nods, understanding. “So who are we studying?”

She can hear the grin in Monty’s voice. “Vigilantes.”

Octavia chokes on nothing. “Sorry, what?”

“I’ve been tracking their patrol routes,” he explains, and Octavia can feel the blood starting to drain from her face. “They always make the same general circles--although the guardian angel’s been missing for the past few weeks. I hope they’re okay.”

Monty’s the only person she knows who speaks about the vigilantes in gender neutral terms, and Octavia definitely appreciates it.

“Okay, so, what, we’re gonna camp out on some rooftop and hope we see a vigilante? What happens if we don’t?”

Monty shrugs. “Then we go down to the subway and watch the potheads, I don’t know. Are you in?”

“Sure,” she decides. “Sounds like fun.” She hasn’t had any luck catching the Commander as the guardian angel; maybe she’ll have better luck, as Octavia Blake.

“This better be a real project,” Bellamy warns, when she tells him about it at the gym. As far as he’s concerned, they’re studying potheads on the subway, but she kept the time and date correct.

“It is,” she says. “It was Monty’s idea. You can call him to double-check.”

“Oh, Monty’s going?” Bellamy nods. He likes Monty. “Okay, fine. But I want you home by midnight.”

“Deal,” Octavia leans up to swipe a kiss to his cheek. “Thanks, big brother.”

“Yeah, yeah, don’t bother trying to butter me up, I already said yes,” he grumbles, but he’s grinning anyway.

He pours hot chocolate in a thermos for her to take, when Monty and Jasper come pick her up around sundown.

“Please come back in one piece,” he says, and Octavia feels a pang of guilt at the exhaustion in his voice. He’s been worried for so long, she’s not really sure if he knows how _not_ to be.

“They’re just potheads, Bell,” she rolls her eyes. “I’ll call you if I need anything.”

Monty leads them to the top of some hotel he has a general key card for, that lets them get access to the roof.

“My mom’s the lead housekeeper,” he explains, and Jasper brings out a blanket from his backpack, which they all huddle up under, with Octavia in the middle. They pass the thermos back and forth as they wait.

It doesn’t take long before Octavia hears the sound of footsteps on a roof some buildings away. Whoever it is, is running, light on their feet and unafraid of heights. Jasper’s in the middle of a joke-- _a time traveler, a priest, and a gypsy walk into a bar_ \--and she shushes him, so she can hear better. There’s the rustle of shoulder pads, body armor, the sound of metal slicing through air.

“It’s the Commander,” she whispers, and beside her, Monty gasps.

Just then, they hear the scream. A little girl, no older than eleven, maybe ten. On the street below them.

The Commander doesn’t stop or slow down or even turn towards it. She doesn’t seem to care. Octavia waits until the second scream, to jump up.

“What are you doing?” Jasper asks, as Monty pulls out his phone.

“We should call 911,” he says, but Octavia’s already on the other side of the roof. She could race back down the stairs, but the balconies will be quicker. She clicks her tongue, letting the echoes guide her. She can see exactly where she needs to land.

“Don’t bother,” she tells them, and then jumps.

Climbing was always one of Octavia’s favorite bits of Indra’s training. They’d go to abandoned warehouses or car parks or underpasses, and Octavia would do whatever it took, to get to the top and then back down again.

That’s what she does, now; keeping the balls of her feet flat against the building, the window ledges, fingers crooked and stronger than they look. She makes her way down to the street in less than a minute, landing in a crouch, just a few feet from the van.

There are three men, and she recognizes the pulses of two of them. She’s fought them before, left them tied up for the police to handle, but apparently they’re out again, and she thinks back to the Commander’s words, grating against her skin. This time, she’ll handle them, herself.

They’re dragging the girl towards the van, trying to push her into the back but she’s putting up a fight. Octavia likes her immediately.

She has no weapon, and no mask. They’ll see her face, but she’ll just have to deal with that. Maybe if she knocks them out hard enough, they won’t remember.

“You must be lost,” she says, and the men freeze for just a moment, to stare at her. One of them laughs.

“Honey, I think _you_ must be lost,” he laughs, but quiets down as Octavia picks up a metal pole, from what might have been a shower rod, lying abandoned by her feet.

“No,” she says, gripping the metal tight in her fist. “I know exactly where I am.”

She swings back, and cracks the pole against the nearest man’s head.

As usual she loses herself in the feel of pavement beneath her feet, the feel of skulls beneath her fists, the feel of metal in her hands as she whirls it through the air, the smell of blood from where she makes contact, the smell of rain as the sky gets ready to open up on top of them.

Eventually, the fight is over, the men are down, and the girl has run into the hotel to call her dad to pick her up. Octavia almost forgets where she is for a moment, as the adrenaline starts to dissipate, leaving her to sag against the filthy wall.

“Oh my god,” Monty says, at the same time Jasper crows “That was _awesome_!”

Octavia jumps and turns towards them. They must have taken the stairs down inside, and come out the back door to find her.

“I mean, I knew your brother taught you to fight, but--I didn’t know you could do _that,”_ Jasper continues, speaking a mile a minute in his excitement. For a minute, Octavia thinks they might not actually realize who she is.

“You’re her,” Monty says, sounding some mixture between astonished and sick. “You’re the guardian angel of Hell’s Kitchen.”

Jasper freezes and stares. Octavia feels his jaw drop open. “Holy _shit_.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Octavia snaps, but her voice is raspy with nerves and even she can tell she’s lying.

“We won’t tell anyone,” Monty offers, sounding a little hurt that she’d try to deny it. “You’re our friend.”

“Yeah,” Jasper bobs his head up and down, disrupting the air around him, as the first of the rain begins to fall. “Your secret’s safe with us.”

They both just sound so _earnest_ , and for a moment Octavia has to just stand there, letting the rain wash over her, drenching her hair and her sweatshirt, making her jeans stick to her skin, washing the blood from her skin as the pole grows heavy in her hand. She’d forgotten what it felt like, to trust people. She doesn’t even trust herself much, these days.

And if she has to wipe her eyes a little, she’ll blame it on the rain. The boys pretend not to notice. Everybody knows Blake’s don’t cry.

“Come on,” Jasper calls, holding his bad up above his head, like it might actually do something to protect him from the weather. “Let’s go watch some potheads for a while.”

Octavia nods, dropping the pole in a puddle. She waves a hand at the men laying unconscious on the ground. “Help me with them, first.”

She points over at the dumpster.

“You want us to help you lift them?” Jasper asks, sounding doubtful, which makes sense. Octavia knows he comes close to failing gym class every year.

“I don’t have super strength,” she says. “So yeah, I need your help. Come on.”

Between the three of them, they get all three men over the edge, and Octavia shuts the lid for good measure. The trash won’t be picked up for at least two more days, and this particular dumpster looks like it hasn’t been used in at least six months; she’ll let them rot in there, for now.

Bellamy wakes Octavia up two days later, and drags her out to the living room, where the morning news is playing a story on “the return of Hell’s Kitchen’s guardian angel.” Apparently the girl from the alley told everyone what she saw, and the media now has a rough sketch of the vigilante’s true appearance.

A young girl, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six, with brown hair and brown eyes.

“They got my eye color wrong,” Octavia says, and Bellamy scoffs.

“Seriously? That’s all you have to say about it?”

Octavia sighs, falling down on the couch. “I’m sorry, Bell. I really didn’t mean to--but they were throwing that girl in the van. I had to do _something_!”

“You _should have_ called the police,” Bellamy growls. “Vigilantism is _illegal_ , O. Not to mention how much you’ve pissed off ever low life in this city. Do you have any idea how much they want to find you? Do you know what they want to _do_ to you, if they do?”

“I have a few ideas,” she says, dry, and Bellamy throws a pillow at her head.

“This isn’t a _joke_ , Octavia!” he shouts, and then sinks down on the cushion beside her. She feels him put his head in his hands, taking in ragged breaths like he’s trying to keep from crying, and Octavia slides over, wrapping her arms around his middle, laying her cheek on his back.

“I’m sorry Bell,” she whispers, and he clutches at her arms, holding her so tight it almost hurts.

“I don’t want to lose you,” he says. “I _can’t_ lose you.”

“You won’t,” she promises. “It’ll take more than a fight to take out a Blake, remember? We’re stronger than that.” She moves her head, digging her chin into his shoulder. “And if anything ever happens to me, it won’t be your fault, okay?”

Bellamy gives a dry laugh. “Self-blame runs in the family, remember?”

“Yeah, but so does kicking ass,” Octavia says, and he laughs again, harder. “You can’t protect me from this one, big brother. It’s who I am.”

Bellamy sighs. “I’m never gonna not worry about you,” he warns her. “I can’t believe I thought the biggest thing I had to worry about was unprotected sex.”

Octavia freezes, and he groans. “About that,” she starts, but he covers his ears.

“I don’t want to know,” he decides. “Just--be careful. _Gotta have a ticket if you want to ride the ride_ , and all that. And uh, if it’s with a girl--use gloves, or something.”

Octavia giggles as he starts to run away.

 

Octavia wasn’t sure how knowing that she was secretly a vigilante might change her friendship with Monty and Jasper, but when she sits in her usual spot between them on Monday, it seems like nothing much has changed.

“So, what’s up with your rivalry with the Commander?” Jasper asks, leaning over to whisper so no one else will hear, but Octavia clamps her hand over his mouth, anyway.

“I’m not talking about that _here_ ,” she hisses before letting go.

“Right, yeah, of course, sorry,” Jasper slinks back in his chair, as Monty clicks his tongue at him, in disappointment.

“We agreed we weren’t going to be weird about it,” he chastises, and Octavia ducks to hide a grin.

“Hey, are you still grounded on Prom?” he asks, and Octavia shakes her head.

“Report cards come out the month before,” she grins. “So I should be free by then. Why?”

“Harper’s parents are out of town that weekend, so she’s throwing a three-day party,” Monty explains.

“And everyone’s invited, so you know it’s gonna be _cray_ ,” Jasper adds, just to make them both groan at him.

“Never say that word again,” Octavia glares. “But yeah, I should be able to make it.”

Octavia’s school sends report cards out in the mail, and hers arrives that Tuesday, without a C- in sight. Bellamy hangs it up on the fridge, beside her essay. He takes the nails out of her window that night.

“The curfew stands, though,” he warns her. “You can patrol or whatever on weekends, but weeknights I want you in bed by eleven.”

“I’m eighteen, Bell,” Octavia points out.

“And when you’re in college you can stay up as late as you want,” he tells her.

“About that--I’m not really sure I want to go to college.”

Bellamy’s quiet for a moment, and she knows he’s trying hard not to get upset. “Why not?”

“I just don’t really _like_ school, and I don’t want a degree or anything, so why waste the money?”

“Because a college degree, even a general one, would help you get a job in the future,” Bellamy says, like he’s repeating on of her guidance counselor’s brochures. Which he very well might be.

“Okay, but I don’t really _want_ a job that you need a degree for. I’ll just be a trainer at the gym, like you. We both know I can fight, and--”

“No,” Bellamy shakes his head. “No way. You’re smart, O. You’re talented. You can do way better than Pike’s.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Pike’s,” Octavia argues. “You’re smart. You’re talented, and you work at Pike’s.”

“Only because I didn’t go to college.”

“Well, maybe you should. I can take care of the bills, while you get your education.”

She can hear Bellamy grinding his teeth again, irritated. “That’s not how this works,” he says, finally.

“Why not?”

“Because--it just _isn’t_. _I_ take care of _you_ , not the other way around.”

Octavia glares. “I thought Blake’s take care of each other,” she points out. “Or at least we _used_ to. Before I went blind.”

“This isn’t about this,” Bellamy starts, but Octavia cuts him off.

“Isn’t it? Would you be this adamant about me going to college, if I wasn’t _disabled_? Would you be this concerned with taking care of me? Would you still refuse to let me pitch in, if I could see the way I used to?”

Bellamy’s working his jaw again, stewing.

“Yeah,” she scoffs. “I didn’t think so. Look, I’m _fine_. I am, I’m better than ever. I can _do_ things, Bell. I can take care of myself, I can take care of you, I can get a _job_. And if you want to live your life and do all the stuff you were never able to, that’s great. But you can’t do them through me. You can’t live through me.”

“Is that what you think?” Bellamy asks. “I’m not--I just want you to have all the things I didn’t. I don’t want you to regret anything.”

“Yeah, well tough shit,” Octavia says, and he lets out a startled laugh. “I’m going to regret some things. That’s just life. But I don’t care about college, I never did, not like you. I know I won’t regret that.”

Bellamy lets out a tired breath. “Alright,” he decides. “Okay, fine. College is off the table. But you do have to get a job, after you graduate.”

“Deal,” Octavia agrees, and they shake on it.

 

She doesn’t realize how much she’s missed the city until she goes out on patrol that Friday night. Things change once the sun goes down; the air is different, the streets feel different, everything is darker and more on edge. She feels wired, like someone’s hooked her up to a generator and switched it all on. She feels like a million light bulbs are lit up inside her, making her glow from the inside out. She isn’t even searching for the Commander, or any fight in particular. She just wanders, and waits for the world to come to her.

It does, of course. It always does, eventually.

Octavia stumbles across some muscle-head thug holding a knife to Murphy’s throat, and she takes him out easily, with a well-timed kick.

Murphy stares at the man on the ground impassively, and then back up at Octavia. She’s wearing her scarf, so he can’t tell who she is, but he doesn’t seem perturbed in the slightest. “Thanks, I guess.”

John Murphy is Hell’s Kitchen’s resident street rat. If anyone wants information on anything, Murphy’s the one to ask.

Unfortunately, he’s also a pretty well-known criminal, so Octavia puts him in an arm-bar, and shoves him face-first against the wall. She doesn’t feel at all bad about it. Murphy’s from her neighborhood, and he’s a dick. He used to steal her Halloween candy.

“Tell me what you know about the Commander,” she orders, and Murphy grunts unhelpfully. She loosens her hold just a bit.

“Not much. She’s a bitch,” he says. “Even more than you, and that’s really saying something.”

Octavia breaks his finger, just because she can. She’ll ask forgiveness for it later.

“ _Fuck_ , alright, alright,” he hisses. “Her real name is Lexa something. She’s from some Eastern European country and came here as a kid. She _was_ dating some blonde doctor lady named Clarke, but now they’re on the outs. And uh, she’s the one who gave up Spacewalker for dead. She’s got something against the mafia.”

“That’s a lot of _not much_ ,” Octavia growls, and Murphy shrugs as best he can, while in a choke hold.

“What can I say? I’m modest.”

Octavia scoffs, stepping back, shoving him towards the ground. She can tell he’s eyeing the knife just a few feet away, and she clicks her tongue. “Go for the knife, and I end you.”

Murphy grins, giving a stupid little fake bow. “In a non-criminal way of course, I’m sure.”

“Try it and find out,” Octavia gives her sharpest smile, gratified when Murphy immediately sinks back on his ass, sitting up against the wall.

“Why are you after the Commander anyway?” he asks, clearly fishing for any sort of information he can sell for a quick buck, or a favor. Murphy prefers to work in favors. “Aren’t you two on the same side?”

“No,” Octavia says. “Stay out of trouble, Murphy.”

“Oh, I try. It’s trouble that can’t stay out of me.”

 

Monty answers his phone on the second ring. “Octavia?” He doesn’t sound like he was sleeping, even though it’s after midnight, so she assumes he was already up.

“Yeah, can you look up someone’s address for me if I only have a first name and general area?”

“Um, that depends. How general is the area, and how common is the first name?”

“Her name is Clarke, and she lives in the Sky Box, close to Tri Crew territory.”

She hears his knuckles crack, and assumes it’s for dramatic effect, before he starts typing. “Okay, that should work. Hang on for a second.”

He’s back two minutes later. “Okay so I have a Clarke Griffin, and a Clark Mills, both within a five-mile-radius of Tri Crew territory.”

Octavia tries to remember if she heard a surname, but she can’t. “Which one of them’s a doctor?”

“Uh, Clarke Griffin’s a nurse at Mercy General ER.”

“That’s the one. What’s the address?” He reads it out to her, but then hesitates. “What is it, Monty?”

“Are you in trouble? Are you hurt?” It takes her a moment to realize he’s asking, because she’s going to visit a nurse.

“No, she just has some information I need. Don’t worry, I’m fine. Goodnight, Monty.”

“Night,” he says, still sounding a bit skeptical, but Octavia ends the call anyway, and starts walking downtown.

She makes it maybe twenty minutes, before everything goes to hell.

Octavia can hear everything thrumming through the city at once, but there’s one sound in particular that she singles out. A heartbeat that she recognizes.

It’s the Commander. She’s somewhere underground, and she’s scared.

Octavia follows the sound, racing through the alleyways, climbing up the fire escape so she can run across the roofs; there’s less in her way, and no traffic to worry about. She just has to make sure she doesn’t misstep, when she jumps.

Two blocks later, she’s found the warehouse where the Commander is being kept. She can hear two other heartbeats with her inside, and she recognizes them too.

Cage and Emerson.

“Just tell us where the little demon is,” Cage says, “And we won’t drop you down in the river, like we did your other friend.”

“ _I don’t know_ ,” the Commander growls. Then there’s the sound of electricity, and her muffled scream. They’re electrocuting her with a car battery; Octavia can hear the sound of the ignition.

This is the moment she’s been waiting for, she realizes, ever since she first put on the scarf. She can handle Cage and Emerson. They might have gotten the drop on the Commander, but they won’t get the drop on her. With one last slow breath, Octavia slips in through the open skylight, and drops onto the floor, sending up a cloud of sawdust and drywall where she lands.

“Well, well,” Cage says, voice sickly sweet and echoing through the space around them. “I guess it’s true what they say--speak the Devil’s name, and He shall appear.”

“I do hate to disappoint,” Octavia snaps, and punches him in the face, like she’s been wanting to since she was twelve years old and his fight put her brother in the hospital. The crunch that his nose makes is incredibly satisfying, and she whirls around to find Emerson.

He’s standing by the Commander, who’s strapped to a chair with a wet sponge clenched between her teeth, and a wire clamp attached to both hands, leading straight from the open hood of a Nissan parked nearby.

“One more move and I fry her,” he warns, and Octavia shrugs.

“Go ahead. I don’t care. I’m here for you two.” It’s a lie; she does care. She cares a lot, just like she would if she was about to see anyone get electrocuted. But she doesn’t know the Commander, not really, so she can still think clearly, and right now bluffing is her best bet.

She almost doesn’t hear the gun click in time, as the bullet falls into the chamber. Octavia ducks right as Cage pulls the trigger, and the bullet that would have lodged in her head, flies straight through the air and clips off the side of a nearby square pillar. Octavia moves down, sweeping Cage’s legs out from under him, before bringing the heel of her food down on his nose, again, and then his crotch for good measure. She picks up the gun where he dropped it, and aims it at Emerson’s chest. She can probably shoot him in the shoulder, and he’ll still live. She’s never trained with a gun before, but how hard could it be?

There’s the buzzing of something in the back of Octavia’s brain, getting louder and louder, until finally she pulls the trigger--right as she drops her arm. The bullet tears through her shin, and Octavia screams, falling down to one knee.

Octavia glances up as someone steps out of the shadows. How could she have missed a third person? She reaches out, trying to listen for their pulse, but there isn’t one. The person in front of her has no beating heart.

They’re dressed in all black, including their mask, except for two miniscule slits for their eyes. They don’t say a word, but Octavia somehow knows that the buzzing in her head is from them. It starts to get louder again, and it feels like it should be painful, but it isn’t. Octavia starts to raise the gun, without meaning to. She tries to lower it again, but it doesn’t work.

Her arm isn’t listening to her. It’s listening to the noise that’s in her head. The noise that wants her to kill the Commander.

Emerson steps away, to make room for the stranger, who stands just behind the Commander’s chair. They’re still silent, still unbreathing, unmoving, somehow un-alive. If Octavia couldn’t see the outline of their figure, she wouldn’t even know anyone was there.

The gun aims. Her finger moves into the trigger well. Octavia closes her eyes and focuses. She clears her mind, the way Indra taught her, until even the buzzing is gone--just for a second.

She pulls the trigger.

The Commander’s scream is muffled by the sponge as the bullet moves through her shoulder’s socket, straight into the stomach of the figure behind her. Emerson shouts. The stranger dissolves into shadows, and Emerson runs out into the night. When Octavia glances over to where she left Cage, she finds he’s gone as well. There’s just her and the Commander, still gagged and tied to her chair, and starting to sag a little.

Octavia limps over to her, tearing up with each agonizing step. Her entire right leg is on fire, foot starting to go numb and collapse beneath her. But she still reaches the chair, and manages to fumble with the ropes until they’re loose enough for the Commander to shake them off, spitting the sponge from her mouth in outrage.

“You little fool,” she hisses, and Octavia glares at her.

“I just saved your fucking _life_ , lady,” she growls, and the Commander scoffs.

“I was just bait,” she says darkly. “ _You_ were the true goal, and you fell into their trap within seconds.”

“And then I shot my way out of that trap,” Octavia snaps. “So, you’re fucking welcome. Have fun fixing your own bullet hole.”

“I will not take your life tonight,” the Commander decides, and Octavia makes a face at her.

“Thanks for that consideration. Bye.” She starts limping towards the exit, gun still hanging heavy in her hand. Then she thinks better of it; the Commander is still shot, after all. She should offer to bring her to Clarke’s with her, to be patched up. But when she turns around, the warehouse is empty, which is just as well. Octavia keeps on towards the apartment building, just a few streets away. She was _so close_ , and now here she is, once again bleeding and beginning to feel faint.

She makes it up to the front stoop, everything feeling familiar in a surreal sort of way, and everything blurring around the edges, every sense becoming dull. She manages to find C, GRIFF in big block letters, and digs her thumb into the grimy button, until she hears the buzzing upstairs. She holds it down, until the static kicks in, and an irritated voice barks “ _What_?”

“Raven?” Octavia asks. “It’s--you remember the girl who bled all over your couch?” Her voice is beginning to slur as she leans heavily against the heavy security door.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Raven says, and the door clicks open right as Octavia passes out, so she lands just inside.

 

Octavia wakes up on what feels like a couch, and a wave of de ja vu crashes over her. She can hear Raven whispering angrily into a phone.

“There’s so much blood, Clarke, you _know_ how blood freaks me out. Yeah, yeah, fine, whatever, just _get here_. We are _not_ about to turn into some emergency room for the superheroes of Hell’s Kitchen, okay? Okay. Love you too, bye.”

Octavia clears her throat, because it seems like it might be rude to pretend to be asleep while Raven’s talking to her girlfriend. “Thanks,” she offers, feeling immediately awkward.

Raven snorts. “Don’t start getting shy on me now. You collapsed on my doorstep, remember?”

“I was actually looking for your--girlfriend,” Octavia explains. “I accidentally shot myself in the leg.”

“One, Clarke’s my roommate not my girlfriend. Two, how the _fuck_ do you accidentally shoot yourself in the leg?”

Octavia probably shouldn’t hit on any pretty girls while she’s bleeding on their couch. That seems like some sort of social interaction foul. So she focuses on the pain in her shin instead, and sighs. “It’s a long story.”

“Well, we’ve got,” Raven moves her arm, probably checking her watch although it’s hard for Octavia to tell. “Twenty-five minutes until Clarke gets home and takes the bullet out of your leg. So maybe you should start talking.”

So Octavia tells her the bare bones of her story. How she lost her sight, and then was trained to see in a different way. How she saw the news about Spacewalker and decided to use her abilities to help people, the way she’s always wanted to, and the only way she knows how. By fighting. She’s never been a healer, never been good with anatomy or making things better. But she knows how to throw a punch, knows how to throw her weight around, knows how to let the devil wreak havoc on whoever she goes up against.

She tells Raven about meeting the Commander--she leaves out Murphy, but says she heard that Clarke knew Lexa once, and she was hoping she might be able to help her find the vigilante and put a stop to her. She tells her about stumbling onto the warehouse, and the figure in all black.

When she finishes, Raven lets out a low whistle. “That is some bullshit you’ve been through,” she decides. “How old are you, anyway?”

“Eighteen,” Octavia says, probably too fast, even though it’s technically the truth. But if Raven assumes that she’s out of high school or even already in college, she’s not about to correct her.

Clarke crashes into the apartment wildly, carrying some sort of duffel bag, probably filled with medical supplies. Octavia’s leg has gone mostly numb, which she’s not sure is a good sign.

Clarke rushes over to her side, still smelling like antiseptic and other hospital things, snapping gloves onto her hands as she goes, before rifling through her bag for the necessary tools.

“This is going to hurt,” she warns, and Raven hands Octavia a throw pillow to bite down on, and then settles on the floor by her head, to take her hand. Her fingers are cool and slender, fitting right in the spaces between O’s own.

Clarke does something to her leg that makes her scream and thrash around, even as both of the women hold her down as best they can. Raven doesn’t let go of her hand, even as Octavia clenches it so hard the bones might break.

“You know,” Raven muses in between the moments of pain, “This whole relationship will work a lot better if we know your name.”

“Octavia,” she gasps, because at this point, keeping secrets hasn’t really done her many favors, and also because Clarke is knuckle-deep inside her leg, and O’s pretty sure she’s going to pass out soon.

“Pretty,” Raven murmurs, and Octavia just grips her hand tighter.

“There,” Clarke lets out a deep breath, rocking back on her heels as she yanks off her bloodied gloves to toss them in the trashcan. “All stitched up, and I gave you a shot of penicillin that should kill any infection. You should try and get some rest.”

“Can I use your phone?” Octavia asks, muzzy from the pain killers Clarke made her take. “I need to text my brother, or he’ll be worried.”

“Is he a superhero too?” Raven asks, mild, and Octavia shakes her head.

“Nope, just a regular one.” Clarke opens the speech app for her, and Octavia says _text to number 667-543-4578:_ _staying with my friend clarke for the weekend. i’m ok. this is her number if u need to reach me. love u_ and then hands the cellphone back.

“I’m gonna go pass out,” Clarke declares, bending down to smack a kiss to Raven’s cheek before disappearing into a back room. Octavia watches as Raven’s figure moves closer to her, scooting on her butt across the floor.

“Can I ask you a question?”

Raven hums. “I might give you an answer.”

“What did you mean last time, when you said you were done with the superhero bullshit?”

Raven makes a low noise in her throat and reaches up to mess with her hair, tied back in a pony tail. Octavia really wishes she could see details, because she has a feeling that Raven’s face is worth staring at for hours, studying each line and little crevice.

“My ex boyfriend, Finn, cheated on me with Clarke,” she explains, although it isn’t much of an explanation at all. “That’s how she and I met. And Finn--he was Spacewalker.”

Octavia’s eyes go wide, and Raven lets out a dry laugh.

“Yeah,” she says, “I know. Anyway, after we both broke up with Finn, Clarke dated Lexa for a while, and you’ve met her,” Octavia can tell she’s making a face, like Lexa’s name tastes bad. Octavia doesn’t really blame her. “So that didn’t turn out too well. We both stayed friends with Finn though, _and_ Lexa, but then some shit went down, and Lexa had two options. She could let go of her vendetta, and stop hunting the mob, or they’d kill Spacewalker.”

“And I’m guessing she didn’t stop hunting the mob,” Octavia says, quiet, and Raven nods, hair moving wildly with the motion.

“Yeah. So, they caught Finn, and they strapped a cinder block to his boots, and dumped him in the river. Clarke and I tried to get to him in time, but we were too late, and Lexa was long gone.”

“I’m sorry,” Octavia offers, but Raven just shrugs. “Why is Lexa out to get the mob, anyway?”

“She was engaged, before Clarke. Childhood sweethearts, the whole nine yards. Her name was Costia. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I guess Lexa pissed off the wrong person and one day, she woke up with Costia’s head right next to her pillow.”

“ _Jesus_ ,” Octavia breathes.

“Yeah, those fuckers don’t play around.” Raven agrees. “So, you know. If anyone has the right to be a bitch, I guess it’s her. A few weeks later, the Commander showed up, and it’s been hell out there ever since.”

“I’m sorry,” Octavia says again, and Raven leans her head on the couch cushion, close enough that Octavia can smell tomatoes on her breath.

“For what?”

“Complicating your life,” O explains. “With more superhero bullshit.”

Raven snorts, the burst of air scattering Octavia’s hair where it’s splayed on her shoulder. “You’re the nice kind of complication,” she says, and then stands up. “Get some sleep, Octavia.”

“Goodnight, Raven.” But she’s already gone.

When Octavia wakes on Clarke Griffin’s couch for the third time, she can feel sunlight streaming in through the window, heating up the skin of her bared legs. She can hear rustling in the kitchen, a muffled conversation, the sound of cereal being poured into bowls.

Octavia grimaces as she swings her legs over the couch’s edge. She’s already begun to heal, she can feel it, just like Indra said, but she still has a limp as she walks, following the sound of voices.

Raven and Clarke are in the kitchen, eating cereal at the table. Octavia can see their blurred outlines of bedhead and pajamas, as they pass a giant bowl back and forth. It smells like Fruit Loops.

“Your brother said to let him know when you’ll be back,” Clarke says around a mouthful.

“Your _hot_ brother,” Raven adds, and Octavia winces.

“Yeah, he sent a picture of how disappointed he is, but mostly we just noticed abs. And freckles.”

“Ugh,” Octavia says, because it’s too early for this, and they laugh. Raven offers her a spoon, so she can share in the community cereal bowl, apparently.

“All the other dishes are dirty,” Clarke explains.

“We live in filth,” Raven agrees.

Octavia shrugs, because it’s not like she’s one to judge. If it were up to her, she and Bellamy would eat off of paper plates, or nothing.

“Alright, I have to go to work,” Clarke sighs, taking one last spoonful before she goes. “I’ll see you guys when I get home. Don’t get shot or anything while I’m gone.”

“No promises,” Raven teases, but Clarke stands firm.

“Don’t even joke about that, Reyes.”

“ _Fine_ , Jesus, there’s no need for last names. Have a good day at work,” she calls, as Clarke slips out the door.

Octavia swallows as she watches Raven chase the last of the cereal around the bowl. She wishes she could see her, _really_ see her. “What about you?” she asks. “Do you have to go anywhere?”

There’s a grin in Raven’s voice. “What, already trying to get rid of me?” she teases, and Octavia feels herself flush.

“No. I just wasn’t sure if I should leave yet, or not.”

“You can stay the whole week, as far as I’m concerned,” Raven says. “I took some vacation time. Finn and I worked at the same garage. It’s where they grabbed him from. I just--don’t really feel like being back there, anytime soon.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Octavia says, stretching out her injured leg so she can sit in Clarke’s vacated chair. Raven stands up and limps over to the counter, where a Keurig machine bubbles. She fills two mugs up with what smells like caramel macchiatos, and carries them back to the table, setting one in front of Octavia.

“Do you have milk and sugar?” she asks, and Raven snorts.

“Who would’ve thought the blind badass needs milk and sugar,” she grunts, moving towards the fridge. “You’re the neediest house guest,” she says, but it’s teasing, and Octavia grins into her mug.

She pours in what feels like three spoons’ worth of sugar, and then puts her finger over the rim, so she can feel when the milk fills up the cup.

“So why did you need information about Lexa?” Raven asks, taking a sip from her own mug.

Octavia makes a face as the memory of her first fight with the Commander floods back to her. “I was hoping Clarke might be able to tell me how to stop her.”

“Yeah, she’s pretty ruthless.”

“And it doesn’t help that she’s covered in body armor, while I have no protection at all.”

Raven goes quiet for a moment, and Clarke can hear her thin finger stroking the rim of her mug in thought. “I might be able to help with that,” she muses. “I do build things for a living. Body armor isn’t that much different from auto-body armor. I’ll look into it.”

Octavia almost forgets how to speak. “Wait, really? For free?”

Raven shrugs. “Yeah, why not? It sounds fun.” She takes another sip of her drink. “Do you, I guess _listen_ to TV?”

“Yeah. I can usually guess the context, from the dialogue. Plus shows like _Jeopardy!_ just say everything out loud anyway.”

“Okay, so let’s see if there are any reruns of _Jeopardy!_ on,” Raven shrugs, and Octavia follows her into the living room. Apparently they were leaving the giant bowl of milk, for now.

There aren’t any _Jeopardy!_ reruns, but apparently there is a _Law & Order_ marathon, and Raven promises to narrate everything that’s happening.

“Okay so now that one guy is glaring at the other guy, the one who stole the diamonds, or so we think,” Raven explains, taking a sip from her coffee, even though it must be cold by now. Octavia had finished hers ages ago.

“You know I have no clue what you’re talking about, right?”

“What?” Raven demands, all mock outrage. “I’m a _perfect_ narrator, Octavia, what are you trying to say? I could go professional.”

Octavia laughs, and then grimaces a the sharp high pitched screech that spears through her brain, from the television. It’s just a tire squealing in a car chase, and the TV isn’t even that loud, but her senses have been off since the warehouse, and she keeps getting bursts of painful noise, like an audio migraine.

Raven catches on. “What’s wrong? Sensory overload?”

Octavia nods, hands over her ears, and then she feels Raven’s cool fingers prodding her shoulders, forcing her to turn to the side, so Raven can slide up against her back. She starts rubbing the pads of her fingers in small circles along Octavia’s scalp, starting at her temples, and moving back and around. “My grandma used to do this whenever I had a headache,” she says, soft, mouth wet and right next to Octavia’s ear. So close she can feel her tongue when she licks her lips.

“Mmm,” Octavia hums, but it tapers off into a moan as Raven’s fingers become more insistent, near the base of her skull.

“Can I take off your shirt?” Raven asks, voice still barely a whisper. Octavia doesn’t even bother trying to speak, just nods, frantic, and lets Raven peel the tank top from her body, leaving her back bare to Raven’s eyes.

She runs her hands down the nape of Octavia’s neck, and over her shoulders, digging into the muscle as she goes, massaging away the knots of tension across each inch. Octavia begins to melt back against her at the feel of it, putty in her hands.

Raven slides an arm across Octavia’s front, thumb flicking at her nipple so she gasps, and Raven leans forward to tug the skin of her ear between her teeth. “Let me take your mind off it,” she asks, and Octavia nods, moving back as far as she can go, slotting herself between Raven’s thighs, giving Raven something she can grind against.

She takes Octavia’s hands in her own, raising them to her face. “I want you to know what I look like, first.”

“I don’t have to touch you to know you’re beautiful,” Octavia grins, but she traces Raven’s face with her fingers, anyway. She starts at her eyebrows, moving down along her cheekbones, and the thin slope of her nose, to the plush of her lips, which part under her fingertips.

Octavia replaces them with her mouth, licking at Raven until Raven whimpers, sliding her hand down into the pajama shorts Clarke let Octavia borrow. She curls two fingers inside her, and Octavia starts to move against her hand, ignoring the tiny sparks of pain shooting up from her bullet wound.

Raven pulls her hand back, and Octavia chases her mouth with a low whine, but Raven pushes her back with a smile, still wet from O’s mouth. “Take these off,” she tells her, pulling at the elastic band of the shorts, and Octavia rushes to follow directions, peeling them and her underwear down her legs, tossing them to the floor with a grunt when she bumps her bad leg into the sofa.

Raven lays back, pulling on Octavia’s hips as she goes. “Come on,” she says, pinching Octavia on the thigh when she doesn’t move fast enough. “I want you on my mouth.”

“Fuck,” O breathes, settling over her, and her eyes slam shut as Raven licks a hot stripe up against her. “ _Fuck_ , Raven.”

Raven hums appreciatively and then wastes no time, fucking Octavia with her tongue, as deep as she can go. She digs her fingers into the flesh of Octavia’s ass, helping her find the right rhythm.

Raven keeps humming, making noises that Octavia can’t understand, and she’s pretty much come to the conclusion that Raven likes to talk dirty, and is probably in the process of mouthing some seriously filthy things into Octavia’s cunt.

It’s nothing like the fifteen minutes she had with Atom. It’s like Octavia’s spine’s turned into a live wire, shooting electric sparks down to her toes and up through her brain, making her eyes roll back in her head at the feeling. She tips her head back as she moves against Raven’s mouth, and thinks about doing this to her, ducking her head between Raven’s thighs, making her back arch under Octavia’s touch. She thinks about Raven biting hickeys into the skin of her thigh, about what it might be like to have bruises that didn’t come from pain. She thinks about Raven calling her things like _baby_ and _good girl_. She thinks about kissing her, when it’s all over, licking the taste of herself off her tongue, and _that’s_ what breaks her in the end, sending white heat across her mind until every sense is blinded, and she slumps back against the couch, trying to steady her breathing.

Raven wriggles out from under her, until Octavia’s curled in her lap, and there’s a smugness in her voice. “Wow, I mean I knew I was _good_ , but--” she doesn’t get to finish the sentence, before Octavia’s framed her face and brought her mouth over Raven’s, making good on her fantasy, leaving Raven shaking under her hands.

Octavia pulls back with a wicked grin, slipping a hand into Raven’s sweatpants, through the damp curls she finds waiting. “My turn.”

When Clarke comes home, she finds them on the couch, both dressed and behaving. Octavia’s got her head in Raven’s lap so she can keep her bad leg elevated, while Raven yells something at the TV in Spanish, and cards a hand through Octavia’s hair.

“Your brother dropped by the ER with some clothes for you,” she says in place of a greeting, and Octavia startles upright, nearly knocking the rum and coke from Raven’s hand.

“You met my brother?” she asks, trying not to panic, sure that they’re both giving her equal looks of confusion. Even she’s not sure why she’s so distressed--she’d told them about him, she’d given him Clarke’s number, she doesn’t know why she didn’t expect this would happen. And is it so bad, that it did? It was just another piece of her two lives, intersecting. Soon there might not be a divide between them at all.

“Hey, calm down,” Raven sets her glass on the coffee table, and runs her hands over Octavia’s face, soothing the skin by her hairline. “It’s okay. Do you want to go change in my room?”

Octavia nods, and Raven takes the plastic grocery bag from Clarke, leading Octavia down the hall by her hand. She shuts the door with a soft click, and Octavia lets her undress her, peeling the clothes from her body until she’s naked and just starting to goose bump.

Raven runs her hands over Octavia’s shoulders and lets out a sigh. “You’re gorgeous,” she says, but it sounds sort of like an accusation, like she’s annoyed about it. “Wanna tell me what that panic attack was about?”

Octavia bends down and runs her hands over the floor, looking for the bag of clothes. She finds it, and pulls out a pair of underwear, and what feels like the tie-dyed shirt she made in middle school. Bellamy bought her the paints and helped her ball the shirt up with rubber bands, before dousing it with orange, pink and purple. She wanted it to look like a sunset, but it came out looking more like she put a white shirt in with coloreds by accident, and it seeped through.

She tugs the shirt on anyway, and Raven reaches out to pull on the hem. “It’s upside down,” she says, and Octavia pulls her arms in through the sleeves, to switch it around.

“For six months, I’ve had two lives,” she says, fighting to find the right words. She’s never had a way with them, not like Bellamy does. It always takes her too many tries, so that by the end, the message doesn’t even matter. “My life as Octavia Blake, and my life as the guardian angel.”

“And now they’re starting to merge together,” Raven muses. “Do you not want them to?”

“I don’t know what I want,” Octavia admits, and she feels Raven nod, pointedly. She presses a pair of yoga pants into her arms, and Octavia slips them on, before Raven leads her across the floor. Judging by the change in air temperature, they’re headed towards a window.

Raven slides it open, and helps Octavia step over the sill, onto the metal fire escape outside. Even in early June, it’s chilly out, and she wishes her brother had packed her a sweater. Maybe he had, and it was still in the bag on the floor. She wouldn’t doubt it; he made her take a heavy winter coat to Homecoming, her freshman year. Just in case.

“I’m going to tell you a secret,” Raven says, so close that her lips brush Octavia’s as she speaks. “Put your arms around me, and hold on tight, okay?”

Octavia nods, wrapping her arms around Raven’s neck, and clutching her close. She’s shaking, but she isn’t sure how much of that is from the night air. She feels Raven’s heart speed up against her chest, a jackhammer in her ears, feels Raven take in a slow breath and then hold it.

Suddenly, they aren’t on the fire escape anymore.

“Raven?” Octavia’s growing colder and colder with each step Raven takes. She can feel Raven walking, legs moving sluggishly, like she’s marching through water, but Octavia can’t feel anything under their feet except air. She closes her eyes, and the city is spread out below them, like a million neon OPEN signs, blinking against her mind, in only one shade. The color of blood.

“I’m the Spacewalker,” Raven whispers, her secret sticky against the skin of Octavia’s neck. “So, now we’re even, right? I know your secret identity, and you know mine.”

Octavia wets her lips, grown chapped in the high altitude. “I guess we should probably keep seeing each other then,” she says. “Since we know each other so well, and all.”

She can feel Raven’s mouth move against her cheek, as she smirks. “Yeah,” she agrees. “I guess we should.”

There’s a moment where they hang still in the air, suspended above the city and unmoving, and it feels like even time has stopped.

But then the moment’s over, and they start drifting slowly down, back towards the fire escape. “If I don’t move, I start to sink,” Raven explains. “It’s like water, kind of.”

“If you’re the real Spacewalker, then why did they kill Finn?” Octavia wonders, and then instantly regrets it. Finn was Raven’s friend, her more-than-friend at one point. Even if he’d cheated on her, Octavia could tell she still cared about him, still missed him now that he was gone.

“All Lexa told them was that Spacewalker worked at the garage,” Raven says. “I’d called in sick that day, so Finn was the only one there when they showed up. He could have given me up, and told them the truth, but he didn’t. He took the fall for me. He _died_ for me. He had to have known Clarke and I wouldn’t save him in time, but he still told them it was him.”

“I’m so sorry, Raven.” Octavia can feel drops of water, on her cheeks. She’s not sure if it’s the sky or Raven that’s crying.

“He used to be so jealous of me, when we were kids. He wanted to be a hero, you know? And I just wanted to work on cars all day, but I was the one who got the powers. I think--it’s fucked up, but I think that’s the only reason he ever asked me out. He wanted to see if they’d rub off, or something.”

“That is fucked up,” Octavia declares, and Raven barks out a laugh. “If he couldn’t see how awesome you are, then he didn’t deserve you.”

“He did though,” Raven says, soft. “In the end. He finally got to be the hero, you know?” They touched back down on the fire escape, and Octavia realizes her whole body has gone numb from the cold.

“Yeah,” she whispers. “I know.”

Raven helps her back through the window, and latches it shut.

“It’s freezing,” Octavia mutters, and then feels Raven’s grin pressed to the back of her neck.

“Let me warm you up.”

They undress each other slowly, running their hands over every inch, taking measure and memorizing. That afternoon was rushed because they were desperate to take the edge off, but now they take their time because they have all night.

Octavia wakes up wrapped in sheets that smell like Raven. She’s naked and bruised, some from fighting and some from Raven’s mouth. There’s a warm arm thrown over her stomach, and Octavia turns slowly, so she doesn’t wake her up just yet.

Raven doesn’t stir until Octavia presses her mouth to the skin of her bad knee, in between the metal hinges of her brace. Raven reaches a hand down to tangle in her hair, pulling her up to kiss her.

“They will always underestimate us,” she murmurs, still groggy from sleep. “Because they think we’re less than we are. Because they think we’re disadvantaged.”

Octavia hums against her mouth. “That’s why we’ll always win, in the end.” Raven curls a hand around the base of her head, holding her in place as she licks into her.

“No more talking.”

 

Octavia stumbles into her apartment, head still clouded from her orgasm--or maybe orgasms, it was hard to keep track--and finds Bellamy waiting for her on the couch. He’s looking at something, his phone or a book, she can’t tell. He’s dressed for church, which means she has to rush through getting ready.

When she gets into her room, she can tell there’s something on her bed, shaped like a box. She runs her hands over it, but can’t tell what it is, so she rips at it clumsily, unable to see where the opening is.

Dozens of little foil packets spill out, and Octavia feels her skin burn, mortified. There’s a smaller box and when she claws that one open, she finds pairs of latex gloves, so at least her brother is keeping an open mind about her sexuality.

“Bell, about that stuff on the bed,” she starts, when she comes back out, but Bellamy just clears his throat dramatically.

“I really, _really_ don’t need to know,” he promises. “Just--be safe, and know that I’ll love you no matter what. Now come on, let’s go get our daily helping of guilt.”

“Forgive me Father, for I have sinned,” Octavia says, and then immediately blurts “I had sex outside of marriage. With a girl. Three times.”

There’s a pause and then Kane says “Alright. Is that it?”

Octavia opens her mouth, closes it, and then opens it again. “Is that--I thought homosexuality was a sin? Isn’t it in the Bible?”

“My dear, the Bible was written 3500 years ago. I think it’s safe to say that in some ways, it’s more than a little outdated.”

Octavia bites back a smile. “I also shot somebody, but they didn’t die.”

“Ah,” Kane sighs heavily, “There we are.”

“What’s my verse for today?”

Kane pauses for a moment, and she can tell he’s thinking. “Luke 10:25-37,” he decides. “Also, say thirty-seven Hail Mary’s.”

“ _Thirty-seven_?”

“God takes guns seriously, Miss Blake. I’ll see you next week.”

Luke 10:25-37 turns out to be the parable of the Good Samaritan, which Octavia must have read at least ten times, for school. She had to do a project on it, for third grade. She and her partner made six puppets out of cloth; the man from Jericho, the robber, the priest, the Levite, the Samaritan, and the innkeeper. But they only got half marks, because they forgot to make a seventh puppet, one for the Ill Intent.

Octavia knows better now. She won’t forget again.

When she comes back out into the living room, she finds Bellamy on his phone--he’s got his volume turned all the way up, so she can hear the little popping bubble noise, for each letter that he chooses.

“Who are you texting?” she asks, curious, and even more curious when his heart immediately skips a beat. He’s _embarrassed_. “Oh my god, is it Clarke? She said you send a picture of you _abs_ , you weirdo.”

“What? No I didn’t,” Bellamy says, moving his phone away when she lunges for it. “Get _off_ ,” he grumbles, raising the phone up out of her reach.

“Siri!” Octavia calls, and Bellamy fumbles, trying to shut the thing off. He’d installed the app to make it easier for Octavia to use, and now it’s betraying him. “Siri, who is Bellamy messaging?”

“ **Hot Nurse Crown Emoji** ” Siri answers, and Octavia crows in triumph as her brother sinks down on the couch.

“I knew it!” Octavia jumps up and down on the couch a few times, in victory, before Bellamy swats at her legs and forces her off.

“Go do your homework or take a bubble bath or something,” Bellamy growls, but his heart rate is still going a mile a minute, even faster when his phone dings with an incoming text.

“You _like_ her,” Octavia sing-songs, and Bellamy throws a pillow at her head, which she dodges easily. “You want to _kiss_ her. You want to _date_ her. You want to _marry_ her--”

“Maybe I want to _fuck_ her, on _my_ mattress,” Bellamy says, and Octavia grimaces.

“Don’t you dare, Bell. I _sleep_ there!”

“You’re about to sleep outside if you don’t stop talking. I’ll toss you out there myself.”

“I call bullshit,” Octavia says, but she’s clearly miscalculated.

“Oh, really?” Bellamy asks, and within the next minute he’s chasing her around the apartment, as she runs from room to room, trying to avoid being snatched up and tossed over his shoulder.

He catches her eventually, of course, because the apartment is only so big and she can only run in a circle so many times. Bellamy scoops her up over his shoulders, fireman style, and spins around until she threatens throw up on him, then he marches into her room and tosses her down on her bed.

“Checkmate,” he huffs, trying to pretend he’s not breathing heavy, and Octavia kicks at him, but he catches her foot.

Bellamy goes quiet with his hand on her ankle, and Octavia doesn’t understand why until she feels his fingers graze her stitched-up shin. He runs his thumb over Clarke’s neat stitches. “What happened?” he asks, quiet.

Octavia takes her leg back slowly, and he lets it go. “You have to promise not to freak out,” she starts, and he snorts a little.

“I’m freaking out right now.”

“Okay, that’s fair. I, um. It’s a bullet hole.”

Her brother stays quiet, which is infinitely worse than if he was verbally freaking out. At least then she’d know where his head was at. “Should you be walking on it?”

“Indra taught me to heal quickly,” Octavia admits, and Bellamy huffs out a laugh.

“Of course she did,” he muses. “And I don’t suppose you thought to teach your big brother that trick, huh?”

“I can try, if you want,” she offers, patting the mattress beside her, motioning for him to sit down. “Okay, cross your legs, like so,” she demonstrates. “Now hold out your hands, close your eyes, and focus on your breathing. Try to slow your heart down, and feel all the air that surrounds you. Now hold that air steady, so nothing goes in or out of your lungs.”

Octavia’s been meditating for long enough now that it’s basically second nature, and she has her mind empty and blank within seconds. But she can feel the irritation starting to roll off of Bellamy in waves as he tries and fails to copy her.

Finally, she sighs and reaches over to pat his knee, comfortingly. “Don’t worry about it, Bell. It’s just easier for blind people. That’s what Indra said. We have less senses to block out, you know?”

Bellamy leans forward and presses a kiss to her hair. “Nice try, O, but I know you’re just smarter than me.” He ruffles her hair, successfully ruining it. “Get some sleep.”

 

Octavia slides into her seat on Monday morning, ducks over towards Monty, who’s half-asleep in his chair, and whispers “I have some stuff to tell you guys.” At his confused silence, she adds “It’s about the superhero stuff,” and bites back a grin when he perks up immediately.

She doesn’t get a chance to fill them in until lunch, which they eat at one of the picnic tables in the courtyard because the weather’s nice and the nuns believe in fresh air. Jasper drops a whole Lunchables pizza, when she tells them the story.

“Hell’s Kitchen’s very first super villain,” he says excitedly. “Now we just have to figure out what their evil motive is. Do they want to take over Manhattan? New York City? _The world_? Or is it something even more sinister--chaos for chaos’s sake, a la The Joker? Or maybe it’s a political or philosophical statement they want to make. Or maybe--”

“Maybe they’re just evil, and enjoy doing evil things,” Octavia cuts him off. “You weren’t there, Jasper. They were...completely _hollow_. Like there wasn’t any life inside them, at all. I couldn’t feel _anything_.”

“Maybe it was a hologram or something,” Monty suggests, but Octavia shakes her head.

“It was definitely real; it was inside my brain. It made me shoot myself.”

“Creepy,” Jasper muses. “But why have you shoot yourself in the leg? Why not the brain, you know, take you out completely?”

Octavia hums, chewing on her tuna salad. “The Commander said that I was what they were really after. Maybe they wanted me for something else.”

“Oh, maybe they want you to join their cause,” Monty guesses, and Octavia makes a face.

“Not gonna happen. I’m not going Dark Side, _ever_. Whoever or _whatever_ that thing was, I’m going to find it, and I’m going to end it. Preferably in the least murderous way.”

“But--you’d kill them? If you had to?” Jasper asks, quiet.

“It’s not killing if there’s no life in them, Jas,” Octavia says as the bell rings. She wishes she could believe herself.

On Tuesday, Octavia walks out of the school doors, only to find Raven waiting for her at the bottom of the staircase. She knows it’s Raven because she recognizes the pulse, and the squeak of metal hinges, and the faint smell of cinnamon and engine grease that Raven can never seem to wash away.

“How did you know?” she asks, stepping carefully down with her cane. It would be just her luck, to go out by falling down the stairs at school.

“Your brother’s been texting Clarke nonstop,” Raven says, voice flat. “He let it slip that you’re in _high school_.”

“I can explain--”

“Don’t bother,” Raven snaps. “The Catholic schoolgirl thing never did much for me. What else did you lie about, Octavia?”

“If you’re worried that I’m not legal, I am,” Octavia says, bitter even though she has no right to be. She just--she’d thought it was more than sex, to Raven. It was more, to her. “I turned eighteen in January.”

Raven’s nodding, hair a tangled up mess pulled back into a pony tail, like she didn’t even bother brushing it first. She scuffs a shoe against the pavement, wearing at the plastic toe. “Come on,” she offers. “I’ll walk you home.”

They walk together in silence, Raven limping as Octavia holds onto her elbow, just because she can. Raven doesn’t shake her off, even though she knows O doesn’t need her guidance, which seems like a good sign.

“I didn’t lie,” Octavia says, finally, when the quiet is too much. “I didn’t tell you I was in high school, but if you’d asked, I would have told the truth. And I didn’t lie about anything else.”

Raven sighs, sounding weary, and it makes Octavia’s stomach sink. Why does she always prove so exhausting? Why do the people around her always seem one step away from collapsing on the ground?

“You should have told me,” Raven says. “But--I get why you didn’t. You were worried I’d see you as a kid.” She stops, and tugs Octavia by the hand around the corner of a building, into a secluded alcove, meant for employee smoke breaks, but nobody’s here.

“I did lie, earlier,” Raven says, pressing Octavia up against the granite wall. “The schoolgirl thing does it for me. A _lot_.” She slides a hand up Octavia’s skirt, stroking the soft skin of her thigh, where Raven left bruises just two days ago. “ _Fuck_ ,” she hisses into the skin of Octavia’s neck, when she presses her fingers to the soaked material of her underwear. “Fuck, you’re so wet already.”

“I’ve been wet since I heard your pulse,” Octavia admits, and Raven swears again, kissing her with more teeth than not, pushing her underwear aside so she can slip two fingers inside her.

Raven does end up walking her home, after she fingers her in the alcove, and then Octavia ducks down to use her mouth on her. She pulls her in for a wet kiss at her front door, like she’s dropping her off after a first date, and then leaves her dazed and smiling stupidly, as she walks inside.

Bellamy’s at the kitchen table, and when Octavia goes over, she can feel half a dozen heavy books, opened up to various passages, as Bellamy writes down notes.

“Are you doing homework?” she asks, a little incredulous. She’s been hinting at college for months, but she didn’t actually think he would _listen_.

“Uh, yeah. Trying to,” he says, sheepish, rubbing at the back of his neck. Octavia remembers what her brother looks like, of course she does, just like she remembers what _she_ looked like, before the accident. But she still wishes she could watch him change and grow older. He probably has laugh lines that he didn’t, before. Crow’s feet, and maybe even the first bits of gray hair. He might be trying to grow a beard, and she wouldn’t even know unless she touched his face.

“That’s great, Bell,” she grins. “Really.” She clears her throat, the air suddenly growing too serious, too emotional. “Pretty soon your report cards will be on the fridge.”

“Alright, let’s not get too ahead of ourselves,” she can tell he’s rolling his eyes. “I actually have to get _into_ a school, first. Then we’ll see about my grades.”

“You’re gonna do great,” she says, firm, pressing a kiss to his messy hair. “Has anyone ever told you that your hair feels like a mop head?”

Bellamy laughs, pushing her away. “Has anyone told you that you’re a fucking _brat_?”

 

Octavia hits the punching bag so hard Raven nearly falls on her ass.

“What part of _go easy on me_ did you not understand?” she growls, steadying herself, and Octavia smirks.

“All of it?”

Across the room, Bellamy’s pretending to work while really he’s just draping himself over the ropes of the ring, flirting with Clarke. He loves it when she stops by the gym, because he gets to strut around shirtless and show off, and Clarke loves it because she gets to check him out without feeling guilty about it, so it’s a win-win.

Except for Octavia, who keeps smelling their pheromones and wanting to gag.

She steps around the bag, and holds out an arm, to help Raven up. “Why do I even bother coming here?” Raven grouses. “All you ever do is beat me up.”

“Complain all you want, but,” Octavia leans in closer, brushing up against her until she feels a shudder wrack through Raven’s spine. “I can smell how turned on you are right now.”

“You can _smell_ me?”

“I could smell you the minute you walked in the room.”

“Fuck,” Raven hisses. “Do you think your brother’ll notice if we skip out early?”

Octavia smirks, heading over towards the weights bench. “In a minute,” she grins. “I really need to finish my sets.”

“God, you’re such a tease,” Raven grumbles, but she follows to spot her, anyway.

“Hey,” Octavia starts, between lifts. “I was wondering, um--would you maybe want to go to Prom with me? I know it’s kind of lame, and you don’t have to, but--”

“Octavia, shut up,” Raven says, but there’s a grin in her voice that makes hope well up in O’s chest. “I would love to go to Prom with you. We’ll make it awesome.”

She can’t stop smiling for the rest of the day.

Octavia graduates on a Wednesday which is, in her opinion, the worst day it’s possible to graduate on. It’s in the middle of the week, so everybody has to take the day off from work, and the ceremony itself stretches on through the morning and into the afternoon, so that by the end, everyone is tired and irritated and _starving_ , but none of the bars are open late.

Octavia had to practice early, before the other students arrived, so she could memorize the number of steps from her chair, to the podium where the headmistress would give her her diploma, to the stairs she’d have to walk down at the end.

She sits with Bryan on one side of her, and Monty on the other, and when Sister Anya calls her name, Bellamy and all the other boys from the gym whoop and whistle, even though they’re supposed to save the applause until the end. When it’s over, everyone congregates in the concessional gardens, which is just a fancy way of saying all the PTA moms brought homemade banana bread and macaroons, while Bellamy brought a packet of cake batter oreo’s, because he’s the best.  
Clarke and Raven are there too, and Raven gives Octavia a chaste peck on the mouth when it’s over, because she wants to prove she can be classy.

They eat dinner at one of the street vendors down the block, and then end up at Gina’s bar along with most of Octavia’s graduating class, because Gina’s is one of the only places that doesn’t card, and it _is_ the only place with free pitcher refills between eight and ten. It’s the kind of windowless hole-in-the-wall that people like to hide out in when they have too much time on their hands. Bowls of shelled peanuts are laid out like decoration, and there’s a single pool table with green felt that sheds in little tufts. There’s a flat screen TV that looks too expensive for the bar it’s in, and it only ever plays Curling matches, because Gina’s main regulars are a bunch of elderly alcoholics who are obsessed with that sport.

Octavia ends up comfortably squished between Monty and Raven, and she can hear Bellamy laughing, from where Clarke is trying to show him how to play some Darts game that she and her rich cousins made up when they were kids. It’s nice, to hear him laugh again, giddy over some girl. The last girl he actually dated was Gina, and even then they didn’t make much of it; they most just watched movies together on the couch, and held hands in public. It was a relationship in name only.

But now Octavia hears his heart skip a beat whenever Clarke texts him, she hears his pulse race whenever Clarke’s near, and she’s so unbelievably _happy_ for his brother. She’s so happy that he gets this.

And with Raven warm and pressed against her, one arm slung easily over Octavia’s shoulders, she’s happy for herself, too.

Monty drags Octavia off at one point, late into the night and way past the free-refills hours, so they have to lean heavily against each other, to prop each other up. He drags Jasper in too, and they all fold in on each other, like a Leaning Tower of Piza with three sides.

“We have to promise to stick together, after this,” Monty says, impossibly earnest with how much he’s slurring. “We can’t--we can’t be those friends who just...drift away, after high school. Not after what we’ve all been through.”

“Yeah,” Jasper interrupts himself with a hiccup. “Best friends forever, for _life_.”

Octavia nods, forehead rubbing against both of theirs, and throws her hand blindly into the middle. “Together,” she says, grinning messily.

Monty slaps his hand over hers. “Together,” he repeats.

“Together,” Jasper crowns the hand stack with his own, and howls like a very drunk wolf.

Bellamy encompasses the trio with both arms. “Okay you lushes, time to go sleep it off. You are gonna be _so_ hungover in the morning.”

Octavia whines, until Raven finds her and gives her a very thorough goodbye kiss, which then has Bellamy whining in the background. Monty and Jasper are crashing at the Blake apartment, and so it’s up to Bellamy to heard three very drunk, newly graduated teenagers home. He gets them all settled in on the living room floor, on rolled out blankets he found in a storage closet, before shutting himself into Octavia’s room, so she can sleep out with her friends.

“Don’t forget,” she whispers muzzily. “Together.” But the others are already asleep.

They wake up late in the morning, to Bellamy playing the TMZ station on full volume, because he’s a dick.

“Fuck you,” Octavia mumbles into her pillow.

“Aw, I love you too,” Bellamy coos, leaning over the sofa to smack an obnoxious kiss to her cheek. He slams both hands on the top of the couch as the boys on the floor groan, groggy. “Who wants greasy breakfast food?”

Three arms shot into the air immediately, as Bellamy rolled Octavia off of the couch. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Come on, you filthy animals.”

They follow him to Cece’s, the twenty-four-hour diner on the corner of the street, the one with the sickly yellow lights with freckles of dead flies and moths caught inside. The booths there are always sticky, and the windows are permanently fogged from age--but it’s also the diner with the best pancakes, waffles, bacon and sausage in town, where they put just a pinch of baking powder in the eggs to make them fluffy, and they add too much butter to everything.

The diner’s gotten an average C- rating by the health inspectors every month, and it wouldn’t be the same without that little report card tucked in the window, proclaiming it’s below average. Bellamy used to take Octavia there every Friday, after his fights. She’d order the chocolate chip pancake with the face on it, and he’d order two American All-Star breakfast platters, and they’d both get the hot chocolate, with extra whipped cream.

Today, Octavia orders an omelet with extra cheese, because she doesn’t feel like pancakes, and they all order black coffee, because the sugar caddy only has the non-sweet sugar substitute that nobody likes. Bellamy orders everyone extra water, because hangovers are apparently just extreme dehydration, and, in his words, _no dumbass teenagers are dying on my watch. Wait til you’re home, to do that._

“So, Octavia, about the super villain in black,” Jasper starts, but Bellamy points his fork at him, menacingly.

“No vigilante talk at breakfast,” he declares. “New rule.”

“Okay, sure,” Jasper agrees immediately. “Um, so how’s the boxing thing going?”

Bellamy shakes his head. “Second rule, no boxing talk at breakfast.”

“Um, alright,” Jasper says, a little bewildered. Octavia smirks into her mug. “Well did you hear about--”

“Jasper, how about you just don’t talk,” Bellamy suggests. Octavia and Monty dissolve into laughter on the other side of the booth.

 

Thursday night finds Octavia on the roof of the hotel Monty took her to, all those weeks ago. She hasn’t seen or heard of the Commander since that night at the warehouse, but she saw her up here, so she figures it’s worth a try. There’s no way the vigilante just dropped off the planet; there are still bodies of mobsters showing up in the morgue, mysteriously. No one knows where they’re coming from, but Octavia’s got a good guess.

She’s been up there for almost three hours before she hears the sound of boots on cement, metal through the air, the rustle of sturdy cloth. The Commander’s silhouette streaks across the horizon, and Octavia takes off after her.

She clears five buildings before the Commander finally stops to face her. “Have you not learned your lesson, then?” she demands, and Octavia pulls out the detachable cane she found for sale online. It separates into two parts, which she wields in each hand.

“I guess not.”

The Commander nods, professional. “Then tonight is the night you die,” she decides, and Octavia loses herself in the movement, the sound of metal against wood as their weapons meet, the sound of bone against padding, the shock that whips through the Commander’s system when she lands a hit to Octavia’s chest, but it just bounces off.

Octavia can’t help the smug curl of her lips as she feels the other vigilante take in her new outfit for the first time. Raven really did outdo herself. Octavia ran her hands all over the leather and metal plates, with metal spikes on the shoulders, and a leather mask and cowl for her hair and face, complete with two nearly indiscernible horns on the very top.

“I see you’ve finally decided to take yourself seriously,” the Commander muses, and Octavia hates her.

“And _I_ see you’re still a bitch,” she growls, and strikes her in the cheek with her cane. Before she can get another hit in, a familiar buzzing starts in the base of her skull. All of her muscles lock up, her limbs go straight and tense, and Octavia is left suspended where she stands. One look at her surroundings shows her that the Commander is trapped just the same.

And that somewhere nearby, a third pulse is getting closer.

The new vigilante arrives out of the darkness, as if from thin air, though Octavia knows that can’t be true. He must have climbed up the side of the building, or something. He’s bigger than either of them, with just a thing narrow cloth tied around his eyes, and his long hair braided back behind him.

Octavia may not be able to see him completely, but she can see enough to tell that he’s formidable enough to be lethal, if she can’t fight back.

The last thing she remembers before everything goes quiet, is the overwhelming buzzing clouding every other sense, until it’s all she knows. And then, nothing.

 

Bellamy wakes up at six AM, like he usually does, and goes running. He likes the feel of the city under his feet, the mist settling in a fine sheen of water on his skin and getting caught in his hair. He never listens to music, instead to the sounds of construction, dogs barking, traffic jams, neighbors having coffee and taking smoke breaks on their front porches, diner door bells chiming with each patron that walks in and out. He listens to Hell’s Kitchen breathe.

When he gets back to the apartment, he knocks on Octavia’s door. She’s graduated by now, but it’s habit and anyway, if she’s serious about working at the gym professionally, she should keep waking up early.

By the time he’s finished making breakfast--actual eggs today, because he felt like cooking, Octavia still isn’t out yet, like she normally is. She must have ignored him and her alarm, thinking she can sleep in now that it’s summer, and Bellamy pours a small cup of water, so he can toss it on her face if all else fails. Octavia can sleep like the dead sometimes, and it can be hell to wake her.

But when he opens her door, he finds her bed empty, her window open with the screen popped out. Bellamy grits his teeth, swallowing his annoyance; maybe she just woke up early, or is already on her way home. He checks his phone, but finds no messages--well, he has three messages from Clarke, but none from his sister. He checks Clarke’s, in case Octavia crashed on her couch again, but they don’t mention her.

He tries Octavia’s cell, but it buzzes to life on her nightstand, forgotten. He texts Monty and then Jasper, but neither of them have seen or heard from her since yesterday morning.

Finally, he calls Clarke.

“Hey,” she answers, breathless and smiling, and any other day he’d be smiling too.

“Octavia’s missing,” he blurts, and all sense of butterflies vanish.

“I’ll be right there,” she says. “Don’t freak out, and don’t call the cops yet. I’ll get Raven up, too. Just sit tight, Bellamy. We’ll find her.”

He has no idea why hearing her say those words so quickly reassure him, but it’s apparently all he needed. He sinks down into the kitchen chair to wait.

Clarke shows up within the hour, looking perfect in jean capris and a shirt that shows just a little bit of skin on her belly. Her hair’s unbrushed and wild, and she doesn’t even flinch when Bellamy immediately pulls her into him, pressing his face to her curls and just breathing.

“We’ll find her,” she whispers, but she’s holding on just as hard.

“She knows her curfew is eleven,” he says, pulling back, and Clarke rolls her eyes at him, which is--perfect. Everything about her is perfect. Maybe not always, sometimes she’s a know-it-all, and a busy body, but right her, right now, she’s everything he wants.

Well, her, and for his sister to be safe at home.

He gestures weakly towards the eggs and toast, still waiting on the table. “I made breakfast.” She nods and leads him over to the kitchen, even though they both know they won’t be eating.

“I promised I wouldn’t let anything happen to her,” he says, sinking back down into the chair, and Clarke pulls up the second one, so she can reach his hand, taking it between both of hers.

“And nothing will,” she says, so firm he almost believes it. She glances down at his hand in her lap, and starts rubbing at the skin between his knuckles, massaging his palms, moving up along his wrist bone, to his forearm, until Bellamy’s leaning half across her lap, with her hands all over his arm.

They almost don’t even notice her phone’s ringing.

She does eventually of course, and jumps a little, startled. “It’s Raven,” she tells him, before picking up. “Yeah? Oh my god, really? That’s great. Okay, yeah, good plan. I’ll let him know. Thanks, Rave.” She’s barely hung up before the grin splits her face open, and Bellamy sags back in relief. He hadn’t even noticed he was digging his nails into his hands, harsh enough to draw bloody, little red half-moons in the skin of his palms.

“Raven’s got her. She’s okay, and Raven’s taking her to our apartment.”

“Thank _fuck_ ,” Bellamy breathes, glancing up at where Clarke’s still grinning above him. He’s been playing the long game with this girl--texting, and getting lunch together, and fucking _study_ dates, all because he’s been too scared to actually take the full leap.

“Fuck it,” he says, and pulls her in by her hips, leaning up as she leans down, meeting him halfway. Clarke sinks down into his lap, whimpering into his mouth until he can’t fucking handle it, and presses down on her back, to bring her as close as she can go.

“Fuck, Clarke,” Bellamy pulls back just enough to see her, but Clarke has other ideas, sliding her mouth down his jaw, biting at the skin of his neck until he’s groaning. She makes a different noise each time he touches her, and he wants to document them all, record them and write them all down so he never forgets. “Clarke,” he says again, and she finally pulls back this time, eyes dark and dazed, mouth swollen, with a little wet trail that he put there.

“Go out with me?” he asks, and god, it sounds ridiculous even to him, but her whole face lights up, and suddenly he’s very glad he said it.

“Does it have to be right now,” she wonders, “Or can we do that later?” She plays with the hem of her tiny shirt, and Bellamy swallows thickly at the sight. “Because I sort of want to stay in, for now.” Clarke tosses her shirt on the floor, and does away with her bra just as quickly, until she’s nothing but inches of pale skin and puffy pink nipples the he needs to put his mouth on.

And so he does, pulling one in between his teeth, while he gets his hand on the other one. Clarke whimpers, holding his head in place while she grinds against his lap, and she yelps when he stands up, with her legs still curled around him.

“What about the breakfast?” she asks, when he moves to lay her out on the table.

“Fuck the breakfast,” Bellamy says, swiping the plates to the floor, and spreading Clarke out before him. He plays with the clasp of her jeans, but she just wiggles impatiently, until he laughs and pulls them open and off, leaning over to blow a raspberry in the skin of her belly until she’s shrieking.

Bellamy can’t help but stare when he’s got her completely naked, under him, as she cants her hips up, like they’re searching for his. He presses his open mouth to her shoulder, less a kiss than a sigh. “ _Fuck_.”

“Do you know any other words?” she teases, pulling him back up by his hair. She wraps her legs around his hips, dragging him into place, and Bellamy reaches down to align himself.

“Not at the moment,” he says, pushing in, and swallows Clarke’s whine when he starts moving.

“Oh, fuck,” she hisses, and she smacks at his shoulder when he starts laughing. “Shut up,” she grumbles. “It’s a--ah--a very applicable word, right now.”

Bellamy just shakes his head and kisses her, deep and full, like he’s wanted to for weeks, ever since that first day. And Clarke kisses him back just as desperately, which somehow makes the whole thing better.

She tucks her face into his neck and whimpers when she comes, and Bellamy holds her close as he follows. She keeps her legs tucked around him after, holding him in place, and he chuckles against her chest, pressing sloppy kisses wherever he can reach, before propping himself up on the table.

“I’ve wanted to do this for a while,” he admits, curling a piece of her hair around his finger. She grins up at him, breathless and _happy_ , and the sight of it makes his chest twist.

“What, have sex on your kitchen table?”

“Have sex with _you_. I didn’t really care where. I want to do a lot of other things with you too.” He lets her pull him down for another sweet kiss, before she lets him go.

“Before we get to the rest of that to-do list,” Clarke wrinkles her nose. “I need to take a shower. I’m sticky.”

Bellamy gives a crooked grin, leaning down to lick a broad stripe up her stomach. She tastes like sweat and salty skin, and he can’t get enough of her. “Go ahead, it’s down the hall. I’m gonna clean up this mess.”

Clarke grins, stretching like a cat before she sits up and pecks him on the cheek, and hops down. “I’m going to use your body wash,” she decides. “So I’ll smell like you.”

Bellamy watches her until she turns the corner, and then shakes his head to clear it, so he can focus on getting dressed. He picks up the eggs from where they’ve splattered on the floor, and sweeps up the crumbs from the toast, before filling the sink up with hot water and pine sol, so he can mop the rest, and sterilize the table.

He’s just finishing up, when Clarke wanders out of the bathroom, wrapped up in a towel, with her hair a mess of damp curls, piled up on her head.

Bellamy passes her clothes over, pressing his mouth to the top of her head. “I have to go check up on Octavia,” he explains, and she nods, losing the towel so she can pull on her pants, as he watches shamelessly.

“You’re a good brother, Bellamy,” Clarke smiles, soft, as she tugs on her shirt.

“I don’t suppose that means you might be willing to help me chaperone a bunch of high schoolers at Prom,” he tries, leaning against the back of the sofa, as Clarke undoes her hair.

“You need help chaperoning teenagers?” she raises a brow. “I’ve _seen_ you with these kids. You’re like the teen whisperer.”

Bellamy makes a face, and she laughs. “If I go alone, I’m just going to be cornered by a bunch of sixteen year old girls--and boys--who keep trying to hit on me and feel up my arms. If _you’re_ with me, hopefully they’ll see I’m with my super hot girlfriend, and just spike the punch bowl or something, like they’re supposed to.”

“What if they try to hit on both of us?” Clarke muses, and Bellamy takes her hand.

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take. You in?”

She pretends to think about it, and swipes his sunglasses when he grabs them off the end table, flashing him a grin. “I’m in.”

 

Octavia wakes up with a throbbing headache, and the feel of granite under her skin. She doesn’t remember much of anything--graduation, the party after, the morning after that, patrol--right, she was fighting the Commander and then, what? Nothing. Just a blank wall of space in her mind where her memory should be.

She wakes up to the feel of someone shaking her--no, not shaking her but picking her up.

“Come one, O, _Jesus_ , help a girl out a little,” Raven grumbles, scooping Octavia up in her arms. It’s slow going, because of her bad leg, but once Octavia is conscious, she does what she can, rolling towards Raven, taking the wait off her, looping her arms around Raven’s neck.

“Morning, Sleeping Beauty,” Raven grins, and starts walking across the air.

She isn’t running, and so they aren’t moving very fast, which is just as well. Octavia’s already feeling nauseous as it is; anymore jostling would definitely upend her stomach.

Raven lands them on the roof of her own apartment building, and Octavia leans against her on their way down the stairs, before shouldering open the door to 31E.

“You’re spending so much time on this couch, you practically live here,” Raven declares, as Octavia sprawls out across the cushions. She feels like every bone in her body has been systematically bruised underneath her skin.

“You should spend time on this couch with me,” Octavia says, but her voice is muffled by the throw pillow, so it loses the affect.

Raven sits down on the floor, facing her, and Octavia can tell she’s feeling serious, shoulders heavy. “Octavia, I found you half-dead on a random rooftop this morning. Your brother called looking for you. He was completely panicked. Nobody knew where you were, or if you were okay. Nobody knew where to look.”

It takes Octavia a few times to speak, because her throat is so dry. “How did you find me?”

“I went up as high as I could, while still seeing people, and walked around.” Raven reaches out and prods the shoulder pads she added to the costume, and Octavia fights back a grimace at the pain and soreness. “Somebody really did a number on you. If you hadn’t been wearing this suit, you’d be dead right now. What the hell happened last night?”

“If I ever remember, I’ll let you know,” Octavia groans.

Raven does not sound amused. “You can’t go picking fights on your own anymore,” she says. “You’ll die. You need a partner.”

“Are you offering?” There’s a beat of silence, and then Octavia grins. “Holy shit, you _are_ offering. Okay.”

“Okay?” Raven sounds skeptical, but Octavia isn’t sure why. The only reason she hasn’t had a partner before is because she never knew anyone who was willing.

“Yeah, okay. Are you sure you want to do this?”

Raven hesitates, which would normally be answer enough, but then she says “Finn wanted me to be like you, I think. Patrol the city, pick fights, protect citizens, stuff like that. Hero stuff. I didn’t want to, because I thought it was stupid. I didn’t see the point in getting myself killed trying to be like the movies, you know?

“And then I met you,” Raven’s voice changes. She’s smiling. “And you were--everything I never was. When I first met you, you were coughing up blood, dying in an alleyway. I thought for sure, that’d be the end of it. You’d learned your lesson, and you’d just stay home. But then you went out again, and again, and even when you got _shot_ , you got back up. You’re a fucking hero. And you make me want to be one, too.”

“ _Jesus_ , Raven,” Octavia breathes, trying to hide the fact that she’s starting to choke up a little. “No one’s ever--I didn’t start doing this to be a hero.”

“I know,” Raven says, matter of fact, as usual. “That’s part of why you are one.” She leans over, to press a kiss to her mouth. It’s probably meant to be chaste, taking care to avoid the bruised parts of her body, but Octavia deepens it, curling a hand into Raven’s hair, to hold her in place.

“Seriously,” Bellamy calls from the doorway, disgusted. “You guys can’t do that in private, or something? That’s my _sister_.”

“Technically, we are in the privacy of _my_ apartment,” Raven grumbles, rocking back on her heels. Octavia tosses a wave towards the general direction of her brother’s voice.

“Hey, Bell.”

“Hey, O. Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she sighs.

“Oh, good. Because now I’m gonna kill you.”

Octavia closed her eyes and opened her eyes, trying to focus on how upset her brother must be--but instead, she notices his hand closed around Clarke’s and she bursts out laughing.

“I can’t believe it. You guys did the tragic kiss thing, didn’t you?”

There’s a beat of silence, and then Clarke says “The tragic what, now?”

“You know,” Raven explains, because of course she gets it. “When you’re in a life or death situation, or you think you might lose a loved one, and in that moment of desperation you both realize you may never get another chance, or you’ve wasted too much time, so you kiss.”

“For your information, it was a _relief_ kiss thing,” Bellamy sniffs.

Octavia grins. “Oh, good to know you at least waited till you knew I was alright, I guess.”

“You are such a brat,” Bellamy mutters. “You’re lucky I’m not grounding you from Prom.”

“I’m eighteen,” Octavia points out, but he just flicks her in the nose, when he finally gets close enough.

The downside to that is now he’s close enough to see the bruising, and why exactly she’s laid out on the couch. Bellamy crouches down beside her, and runs a worried hand over her shoulder, pulling back when she winces.

“What happened,” he breathes, taking it all in. When Octavia opens her mind, she can see him just beside her, growing redder and redder with each passing second, as he lets the rage build up. “Who did this to you?”

“Relax, big brother,” Octavia sighs. “I don’t know, but I’m going to figure it out, okay?”

“What, that’s supposed to make me feel better?” Bellamy grumbles.

Octavia reaches a hand out, and accidentally pokes him in the eye. “Whoops, sorry. Where’s your cheek?” He takes her wrist and guides her hand, so she can feel the ticking in his jaw, the biggest sign of his irritation. She pokes him in the jaw. “That one I meant to do. Look, you can’t fight all my battles for me, okay? Not anymore. I’m a big girl. I’m a fighter. I’ve got this.” She struggles to sit up for a moment and then gives in, and lets him help her. “See? I’m already feeling better. I can probably walk home.”

“How about you don’t do that, because it sounds fucking stupid, and just stay here instead,” Raven suggests.

“I’m with Raven on this,” Bellamy agrees, and it does something to Octavia’s heart, hearing them together, getting along. She knows they _like_ each other, of course she does, but they’ve never actually interacted much, not without either her or Clarke as a buffer.

“If you insist,” Octavia shrugs, flopping back down on the cushion.

“Yeah, it seems like a real hardship for you,” Bellamy notes. “If you don’t feel better by Prom night, do me a favor and let me know, that way Clarke and I can get out of chaperoning.”

“I’m definitely going to feel better by Prom night,” Octavia tells him, and then rolls over to face Clarke, or at least, where Clarke’s pulse is coming from. “He roped you into babysitting, huh?”

“I was promised spiked punch,” Clarke says, completely serious, and Bellamy laughs.

Bellamy leaves sometime after dinner, which is Mexican takeout from the place down the street, and Clarke leaves with him, to _make sure he gets home safe_. Octavia _really_ doesn’t want to think about what they might be doing in her bed.

“Okay, bedtime,” Raven declares, once Octavia’s eyes start drooping. “But first--shower. You smell like rooftop brawl.”

They don’t have shower sex, but it’s a near thing. Mostly, they kiss lazily under the hot water, and comb shampoo through each other’s hair, running their hands over each other’s skin, learning each line, every freckle, every curve.

Octavia falls asleep curled up in Raven’s bed, with Raven’s arm tossed over her, warm and comforting on her skin. She’s not sure she’ll be able to go back to sleeping alone after this. Not now that she knows what it can be like, sleeping with somebody else, waking up in their bed, wrapped up in them and their scent. Waking up to a trail of soft kisses up her stomach, the feel of talented fingers dipped between her thighs.

“You look good in my bed,” Raven says, voice still gravelly from sleep, and it makes Octavia shiver. She rolls over on her back, and Raven immediately mouths at her breasts.

“I might never leave,” Octavia warns, and Raven hums against her skin, leaving wet marks that grow cool as she dips lower.

“Good.”

 

Prom is being held at the neighborhood Plaza Hotel, in their ballroom, which means most of Octavia’s classmates have reserved rooms for the night, either to sleep off their hangovers in private, or to hook up with their dates. Octavia plans on just going home after the dance, because they have alcohol in the fridge and anyway, Raven’s planning to go back to work in the morning, so she can’t stay up too late.

The night’s theme is _Don’t Stop Believin’_ , both because it works as a God pun, and because Sister Anya is a huge Journey fan.

It’s sort of disco tech-y enough to be fun, and there are a lot of group dances, which are always fun. Octavia mostly just lets her friends grab her by the arm and swing her around, trying to show her which move to do, when. Raven keeps an eye on Bellamy and Clarke, who have apparently been cornered by a group of juniors, which seems to get bigger each time Raven looks up.

Octavia’s wearing a dress that she’s been told is some shade of purple, between _dark_ and _very dark_ , with enough sequins to make it sparkle whenever she spins around. She has a new cane, too, a heavy solid plastic that she likes the smooth feel of. Raven’s dress feels sort of like lettuce, and when she says as much, Raven laughs so hard that sparkling grapefruit comes out her nose.

Jasper’s brought a date named Maya, who Octavia remembers from a few electives that were pretty fun, and Monty showed up with his cousin Dana, a shy fourteen-year-old who goes to an all-girl’s school on the other side of Manhattan, and wanted to go to a Prom that includes boys.

The DJ plays no less than _thirteen_ Journey songs, all from the albums Escape and Frontiers, because apparently those are the nuns’ favorites. But they also play an Usher song, so it’s not all bad.

Eventually, the graduating class all get together and make a game of requesting the most sexually suggestive Christian Rock songs they can think of.

There happen to be quite a lot. Sister Elise is the one who figures out what they’re doing, and puts a stop to it. She looks incredibly scandalized.

“God, Catholic school must have _sucked_ ,” Raven grins as they dance to _Open Arms_.

Octavia shrugs. She can hear Father Kane’s pulse in here somewhere by the punch bowl, and she knows Sister Agatha is trying to do the Macarena with a couple juniors. “It wasn’t that bad, actually. I’ll never have to take another Latin class again.”

“You’re right, that definitely sounds awesome,” Raven says, dry, and Octavia sticks her tongue out.

The dance ends at the very respectable time of ten o’clock.

“What kind of school dance ends before midnight?” Raven asks, when Sister Anya makes the closing announcement. “And what happened to the whole Prom Queen and King, or whatever?”

“The Catholic school kind,” Octavia says, taking the lead on their last dance-- _Faithfully_. “And we don’t have a Homecoming or Prom court, because God loves all of us just the same, and monarchies are for suckers.”

She grins, and Raven kisses her. Just a little, because Sister Allison is nearby, and clears her throat a bit pointedly. There isn’t any PDA allowed, beyond hand and waist holding.

Octavia and Raven file outside with the rest of the crowd, and Octavia signs yearbooks for whoever brought theirs--they have to direct her hand, but she just sort of scribbles a few lines for herself.

Bellamy and Clarke are waiting for them on the sidewalk out front, and it seems like they really did have spiked fruit punch, or at least snuck in a flask of bourbon. Octavia can smell it on their breath.

Apparently Raven can too. “I can’t believe you didn’t share,” she declares, outraged. “Party foul, Griffin. Party. Foul.”

“You weren’t getting accosted by jailbait,” Clarke defends, and then hiccups, dissolving into a mess of giggles against Bellamy’s chest. Octavia doesn’t have to see, to know he’s probably playing with her hair and looking stupidly gone over her. Drunk Bellamy is affectionate.

“O!” he crows, and she grins, already thinking about what loud music she’s going to blast in the morning, to wake him up. She’s thinking _Enter the Sandman_.

Bellamy swings one arm around Clarke, and one around Octavia. “My favorite girlfriend,” he noses at Clarke’s hair, and then switches to Octavia. “And my favorite baby sister!” He glances up at Raven, watching them, probably in a slightly judgmental way. “And my favorite baby sister’s girlfriend,” he adds, and then frowns down at himself. “I don’t have another arm, sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Raven smirks. “We’re cool, Old Blake.” She takes hold of Clarke’s hand, and tugs her over. “I am gonna have to take my drunk roomie home, though.” She pecks Octavia on the mouth, leaving a smudge of her tangerine lip gloss behind. “Get home safe.”

“You too,” Octavia grins, shouldering her wobbly brother, and starts walking.

She deposits him on the sofa, where he flops back immediately, while she counts her steps to the kitchen sink, and pours him a glass of water.

“Drink this,” she holds the glass out in his general direction, and hopes he’s sober enough to take it. “Hangovers are just dehydration, remember?”

Bellamy takes the glass and downs it, before leading forward to put it on the coffee table. “You really are my favorite sister,” he tells her, voice low and serious, and Octavia grins.

“And you’re my favorite brother,” she says. “Even if you are a giant nerd.”

“The _giantest_ nerd,” he corrects. Octavia loves him.

She pats his knee. “Get some sleep, nerd king. See you in the morning.”

Octavia doesn’t have time to set up music to wake up her brother, or even turn the TV on full blast. She’s still asleep when the doorbell rings at two in the morning, when the world is still dark and dangerous and cold on her skin.

She walks out to find Bellamy already opening the door, letting in the night air. Octavia focuses her mind enough to see the person standing in their doorway, more shadow than not.

She recognizes the heartbeat more than anything, but the figure herself is familiar, too. The Commander stares back at the Blake siblings, wordlessly.

She clears her throat and hesitates before speaking. “I have nowhere else to go.”

Bellamy’s staring at her like she’s insane, Octavia knows, which makes sense since he’s never met Lexa before in his life, and he doesn’t know anything about the vigilante. Octavia steps forward, putting a hand on her brother’s elbow.

“Bell, this is--Lexa. She’s, uh. A vigilante.”

She can feel Bellamy’s eyes on her, and she knows he isn’t amused. He’s sleep deprived, probably at least a little bit still drunk, possibly already hungover, and he has the fight of his life in just a few hours. There’s no way he’s okay with this. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he says. “What, is there like a vigilante club, or something?”

“We have a support group,” Octavia says, and he elbows her in the side.

“Okay, fine, sure, she can stay. Whatever,” Bellamy throws both hands up in the air and goes back to his couch bed, wrapping up in the blanket without a word. “She’s sharing your room,” he adds, and then rolls over into his pillow, leaving Octavia to deal with the vigilante.

 

When Octavia wakes up the next morning, the Commander is gone. The blanket she used is still in a clump on the floor, and Octavia has to step on it to walk out of the room. She finds her brother and the vigilante in the kitchen. The neighbors upstairs are being quiet for once, and the ones downstairs are never awake this early, so the apartment is eerily quiet, as everyone moves around the room in silence. From the smell, Bellamy is making French toast on the stove, which means he’s nervous, because Bellamy only ever makes French toast when he’s nervous. She can’t tell if it’s about the fight, or their guest, or both, but either way, she hugs him.

If the Commander is surprised by the existence of her brother, she doesn’t give any sign. She doesn’t give much of anything; she’s sitting straight-backed at the kitchen table, not saying a word.

Octavia turns to face her, dressed down in her pajama shirt and bedhead, bare toes still blue from when she asked Bellamy to paint them for her, for Prom. He’s gotten good at nail painting over the years, just like he had to get good at hair cutting, since they couldn’t afford a salon, and Octavia wanted bangs her sophomore year.

“What are you doing here, Lexa?” she asks, and _that’s_ when the Commander flinches. Apparently she didn’t think Octavia knows her real name.

“I told you,” she says, tone clipped and slightly irritated as ever. “I had nowhere else to go.”

“Yeah? Why not. You seem like the type who has a lot of friends in high places,” Octavia grumbles, and she can feel the Commander’s glare.

“I have no friends,” she says, flat. “They are weaknesses. Loose strings. Liabilities.”

“Well, having no friends means having nowhere to go, too, genius.”

Bellamy ignores the argument completely, instead choosing to just glower a lot as he dishes up three separate plates of French toast, and sets them all down on the table a little harsher than necessary, along with a jug of pure New York maple syrup that Octavia’s pretty sure has been living in the back of the fridge for the better part of four years.

“Eat,” he orders, and after a moment of silent stewing, Octavia and Lexa both pick up a fork from the pile he’s laid out, and dig in. He helps Octavia pour her syrup, and then leaves her to her own devices, while Lexa apparently prefers her toast plain, which is no real surprise. She probably likes grilled cheese with no butter, or hot dogs with no ketchup, too.

They’re just finishing up, when the front door opens, and Clarke and Raven walk inside. It’s become a common occurrence recently, and the Blake’s don’t typically keep their door locked during the day, but Octavia’s sort of second guessing that as everyone freezes and stares down the situation.

Clarke and Raven stare at Lexa, Lexa stares at Clarke and Raven, Bellamy stares at all of them, Octavia’s pretty sure, while she just sort of generally takes in the atmosphere of the room. It isn’t good. Everyone is anxious, and surprised, which is never a great combination.

“She had nowhere else to go,” Octavia blurts, because no one else is saying anything, and she feels Raven’s eyes slide over her, slowly. She wonders what it must feel like, to walk into your girlfriend’s apartment, only to find they’re harboring the woman who sold out your friend to die.

“Um,” Clarke starts, fidgeting and awkward. “Bellamy, can I talk to you outside?”

Bellamy’s probably the only one in the dark about the situation, so he just shrugs and leads her out to the backyard, to discuss everything.

Raven hesitates in the door for one more moment before saying “Well that’s gotta be awkward, right? Having to tell the new boyfriend about the old girlfriend that’s eating in his kitchen.”

“I did not come here for Clarke,” Lexa says, and Octavia thinks she might be staring at her hands.

“But you came here for something,” Raven says pointedly. “You always want something.”

“I came for a roof over my head where no one would know to look for me.”

“And if they do?” Raven asks. “If they find you, what are you going to tell them? About the vigilante blind girl who lives here? About her brother? About her girlfriend? Who’s gonna be your sacrificial lamb this time around?”

“Maybe you and I should go outside too,” Octavia decides, catching Raven by the arm and pulling her out onto the front stoop. She shakes Octavia’s hand off, and doesn’t sit down, instead choosing to lean back against the metal hand rail, stretching out her braced leg in front of her.

“I’m sorry,” Octavia tries. “She just showed up in the middle of the night, and she didn’t have anywhere else to go--what was I supposed to do?”

“Let her rot,” Raven grumbles, and then lets out a heavy sigh, reaching a hand over to play with Octavia’s hair. It’s still unbrushed and probably resembles a spider web. Raven starts pulling out the knots, fingers quick and sure, and Octavia sags back against her. “I know you wouldn’t,” Raven sighs. “I just don’t want you to get hurt. And wherever Lexa goes, people end up getting hurt.”

“You’ve seen me hurt,” Octavia points out. “I can handle it.”

“I hope so,” Raven says, but it sounds like assent. Octavia takes her hand and threads their fingers together.

“Everything will be fine,” she promises, and Raven kisses her. The dog starts barking, and the downstairs neighbor sticks his head out his door, and whistles up at them. Raven flips him off, and Octavia grins against her mouth.

 

Bellamy’s fight is in three hours, and he’s definitely nervous.

“I’m not nervous,” he snaps, but he’s made five slices of French toast, even though Octavia can smell the mold in the bread and told him so. He just keeps tossing each finished product in the trash, because he needs something to do with his hands, and he learned at an early age that the best way to take his mind off of something was by taking care of someone else. Cooking is one of the easiest ways to do that. He used to make Octavia what she called _fancy ramen_ , back when they were kids--bowls of noodles with the water drained, and whatever was left of their mom’s old bottle of salsa, poured on top. When they were kids, Bellamy learned to turn anything in the fridge into a dinner.

“Why don’t we go to Cece’s diner?” Octavia offers. It’s cheap, within walking distance, and they have those little coloring mats for kids, which will probably keep Bellamy busy for at least twenty minutes.

“Fine,” Bellamy snaps, turning off the stove, and setting the smoking frying pan into the sink to soak, sending up billows of steam which he pretends not to care about. If Bellamy isn’t doing the dishes immediately, then he’s _really_ nervous, and the thought makes Octavia’s stomach twist uncomfortably. Before a fight, her brother is usually so relaxed it’s sort of worrying. She’s not sure what to make of this change, what it might mean.

Lexa has been sitting in the same chair all day, moving only to go to the bathroom. She doesn’t eat unless the siblings put a snack of peanut butter crackers, or that morning’s French toast, or one of the fruits that they keep forgetting about--it’s either a peach, or a nectarine, or maybe an apricot. Some mystery stone fruit that’s started to go brown in the refrigerator drawer. And now, she peels herself up to follow them down to the diner.

“Two times in one weekend,” their waitress, a plump woman with a name that reminds Octavia of a trailer park, but that she can never remember--Mandy? Britney? Jojo?--says cheerily as she sets out their menus. She does get Bellamy one of the coloring mats, and he goes to town, even though they only have the thick red waxy crayons. “Must be my lucky week, to have the Blake’s here so much.”

Bellamy grins, slipping easily into That Charming Blake Boy that their neighborhood knows so well. There were always two sides to Bellamy growing up--the boy with the crooked smile, who opened doors for old women, and offered to help carry groceries home. And there was the boy with the crooked eyes, who fought in back streets and ran with the Crew, coming home each night with money he didn’t get legally, and an anger problem that put other kids in the hospital.

But then he made it into the ring, and got the job at Pike’s gym, and he started turning things around for himself. Bellamy hasn’t run with the Crew since he was seventeen, has never paid rent with money he hasn’t earned himself, hasn’t scraped his knuckles on another boy’s teeth who hasn’t asked for it.

So tonight the charming Bellamy makes an appearance, and Octavia can feel the waitress blush, just like they always do.

“This restaurant is--quaint,” Lexa offers, picking at a stain of something, that’s hardened on the cracked vinyl booth.

“Don’t shit talk Cece’s,” Bellamy says, mild. “It’s not a restaurant, it’s a sanctuary.” He gestures towards the booth of elderly homeless people, huddling around their complementary cups of coffee, and a few of the older slices of pie that Cece was going to have to throw out soon, anyway. “Everyone knows that if you need a place to go, Cece’s will take you.” He points to the teen girl across the way, looking nervous and green as her key lime pie. She’s got a backpack and a winter hat, and is obviously a runaway. Octavia can hear her rabbiting heart.

“We used to come here when our mom had a John, and locked us out,” Octavia explains, and Bellamy flicks her hair, because he hates when she mentions their mother. She gets it; she hates it too. She was their mom, and she did the best she could, and they loved her, but their lives were so shitty when she was alive, and once she died everything just got _better_ , so it’s hard not to be a little resentful about that. How much better off they would have been.

Lexa makes a noise of understanding, and takes a sip from her coffee. She clearly tries hard not to make a face at it. It’s cute, almost.

“Sorry it isn’t champagne,” Bellamy grumbles, but he’s teasing, and Octavia grins.

Clarke shows up at midnight, to walk over with them. It’ll be the first fight she’s seeing up close, and she’s clearly trying not to worry. She fidgets in front of their booth, glancing at Lexa and then back at Bellamy, and it’s every bit as awkward as it was this morning.

They leave Lexa at the Blake apartment, and Raven stays behind to babysit her.

“You owe me,” she growls against Octavia’s mouth, as she gives her a _thank you_ kiss.

“You can collect when I get back,” Octavia winks, making her laugh.

They leave as Raven switches the TV onto the local sports station, which is filming the fight. Bellamy keeps Clarke’s hand clenched in his own for the whole subway ride over, and they all pretend they aren’t nervous.

The fight is happening in an actual arena, down in Brooklyn. There are people at the door, with a _list_ that they have to check their names against. Octavia has to use her library card as her ID.

Everything inside the arena is loud, overwhelmingly loud, and Bellamy turns to check on her the moment they step inside. Even when he’s about to fight for his life in half an hour, he’s worried about her, and Octavia hates that she can’t reassure him. It’s all she can do to keep stepping forward, even as the sensory overload threatens to drown her. She hates raucous crowds; it’s one of the reasons she never went to her school’s sports game. Well, that and the fact that they were all awful at sports.

“Remember, he’s just big. That’s it. He ain’t tough, he ain’t quick, he’s just intimidating,” Pike tells him, as Bellamy psyches himself up for the fight. They’re in his corner, just before everything starts. Pike’s really only here for show; Bellamy hasn’t needed a coach in nearly four years. He knows what he’s doing.

“Get knocked down, get back up,” she tells him, and Bellamy huffs a laugh, leans forward until their heads are pressed together.

“Blake’s are fighters, yeah?” he asks, like he needs the confirmation.

“Blake’s are demons,” she tells him, and he nods.

Bellamy swipes a kiss to Clarke’s mouth before sliding into the ring, between the ropes. Roan Azgeda is already in, on the other side, and Pike was right. He’s definitely big.

“He’ll be okay, right?” Clarke asks, taking Octavia’s hand in hers and squeezing the life out of it. “I mean, he’s a professional, so he knows what he’s doing, right?”

Octavia watches as the two men square up, bumping fists before stepping back, eyes never blinking away from each other. The referee raises his flag, blows the first whistle. Somebody rings the bell for first round.

“My brother definitely knows what he’s doing,” Octavia tells her. It’s hard to focus, with so much noise, so many smells and swaying emotions, but she can still see the blurred outline of the ring, the moving figures of the boxers. She grips Clarke’s hand just as tight.

Everything is going Roan’s way. He’s not just big, he’s a tyrant in the ring, blotting out every chance Bellamy might have of evening the score out. He’s two steps ahead of every one step by Bellamy, and Octavia really isn’t liking her brother’s odds.

He isn’t meant to throw the fight. He’s meant to win, and she hasn’t seen Cage or Emerson since the warehouse, doesn’t even know if they’re still alive, but they just work for the Kitchen Irish, and Octavia really doesn’t want to know what might happen if her brother loses.

They’re halfway through the fifth round, when everything changes. Roan got a good hit into Bellamy’s ribs, but Bellamy used it to grab hold of Roan’s arm, tug, and strike him in the jaw with a right hook. Octavia doesn’t have to see, to know he’s let the devil out. She’d recognize the burning in his eyes, anywhere. It’s the same as hers.

Apparently it’s the right call. Roan hits the mat, knocked out. The biggest ones always have the glass jaws, it seems. Bellamy’s won.

He hops over the ropes, after they’ve put the medal round his neck. He jumps down to the floor and tugs them all in--Pike, Octavia, Clarke--and Octavia can feel his heart beating so hard she’s worried it might burst, and wouldn’t that be just their luck?

He presses a sloppy kiss to her hair, still breathing heavy, and keeps Clarke tucked into his side, like she belongs there, even as he gives WKMB Sports an interview, even as he thanks God, his mother, his sister, his girlfriend, and his boss. Even as they walk home, his arms lay heavy over Clarke and Octavia’s shoulders, and even though Clarke did what she could in the grit-stained arena bathroom, even with the tampons stuck up his nose, he’s still bleeding, from his nose, from his knuckles, from the cut in his mouth, and his split lip and the cut slashed through his left eyebrow.

Lexa is asleep on the couch when they get home, with some rerun of _Criminal Minds_ running, and Raven sprawled out on the floor, glaring up at them.

“You won,” she says, accusatory, but Bellamy just grins, like he’s been doing all night.

“I won,” he agrees, leaning down to help her up off the floor.

Raven spends the night in Octavia’s bed, while Bellamy wanders home with Clarke, and Octavia doesn’t want to think about how they might be celebrating. Everyone just sort of agrees to let Lexa have the couch for the night, because they don’t want to risk waking her.

“She used to have night terrors,” Clarke whispers. “She tried to strangle me in my sleep, once.”

“Yeah, fuck that,” Raven decides, heading into the bedroom.

She’s in nothing but a pair of boyshorts when Octavia walks in, and maybe she can’t see the details, but she can see more than enough to make her desperate.

“It’s not fair that you’re so hot and I can’t even see it,” Octavia whines, as Raven slides the flannel shirt from her shoulders.

“Use your imagination,” Raven grins, mouthing at the skin of her neck. Octavia shoves her back on her bed, taking a moment to just breathe her in before sliding on top of her.

“Thanks for watching over Lexa,” she says--moans really, because Raven’s teeth have latched onto her jaw.

Raven hums and pulls back. “She fell asleep right after the match. Easiest babysitting gig _ever_.”

“Oh, well then I guess I shouldn’t pay you for it,” Octavia muses, and Raven rolls them over, so she can pin her down, caging her face with her forearms.

“Did I say easiest? I meant hardest. Worst ever. _So_ fucking bad--” Raven laughs as Octavia leans up to cut her off, mid-sentence.

 

Things change, after the match. Bellamy has actual _sponsors_ now, and people calling him for actual fights, arena fights, televised fights that pay above board. Octavia knows he’s searching the classifieds for bigger apartments, with three bedrooms because he seems to have taken a liking to Lexa, however reluctantly, and has decided to adopt her.

Octavia came home to find the two of them playing some sort of drinking game, on the living room floor. There were empty liquor bottles from the ABC down the street, and their rules seemed to have devolved into _whenever one of us says so, take a shot_. They passed out on each other soon after, and Octavia woke up to them groaning and drooling on the carpet. Lexa was using Bellamy’s thigh as a pillow.

Octavia is hired at Pike’s as a personal trainer, two weeks after graduation. The pay is shitty, and the job isn’t as fun as she was anticipating--mostly she just thought she’d get to show people how to fight, but as it turns out, mostly she mops the locker rooms over and over, because apparently people don’t know they aren’t supposed to pee on the changing benches.

But it’s a job, and it means she gets a key to the gym so she can go there at odd hours. It also means that she can use her nights off to patrol the city with Raven.

Raven’s the only one who hasn’t grown to accept Lexa as a part of their group, but she’s getting there. Slowly.

“I just don’t think I can trust her again,” she admits. She and Octavia are sitting on top of a billboard advertising some dentist named Dr. Tsing, who’s apparently perfected teeth whitening. It’s just a few hours before dawn, and the night is so muggy it’s oppressive. Octavia can feel her hair sticking to her skin, with sweat. “What if I finally trust her, and she sells one of us out again? What if she sells out Clarke, or Bellamy, or _you_?”

“I get it,” Octavia says, pulling Raven’s hand into her lap. She kicks her feet against the billboard, making the lights around them flicker. She can feel the buzz of electricity, and it makes her hair stand on end. “But Bellamy really likes her, and Clarke’s forgiven her, I’m pretty sure. I’m not saying you have to, but she’s probably staying for a while. I don’t want you to keep avoiding my home.”

“I’m not avoiding it,” Raven grumbles, even though she totally is. “ _Fine_ ,” she sighs. “I’ll give her a chance--just one, okay? And if she fucks it up again, I’m gonna kick her ass.”

Octavia grins and smacks a kiss to her cheek. “Deal. Now come on, let’s go fuck up some muggers.”

She walks up her front stairs that morning, and hears a murmured conversation from behind the wooden door. It’s Lexa and Clarke having coffee at the kitchen table. They’re speaking softly, but Octavia can make out the words perfectly well.

“It’s in the past,” Clarke says. “I’m over it.”

“I’m still sorry,” Lexa offers. “But I am glad you’re happy. Bellamy is--he’s a gifted fighter.”

“He’s a good person. I love him.”

“Yes,” Lexa agrees, quieter this time. “He is.”

Octavia turns her key in the lock extra loudly, and opens the door.

 

Halfway through August, Monty calls and invites Octavia out to brunch with him and Jasper. They meet at Starbuck’s and get a table outside.

“So what are you guys up to?” she asks, unable to stop smiling. She’s missed them, of course, but she’s been busy, and even with their drunken pact on graduation night, she’d sort of assumed they’d drift apart over time, the way people do sometimes.

“Well, we’re roomies at Manhattan,” Jasper says, and she hears them high five. “The college is amazing, O. It’s like high school, but awesome.”

“I still can’t believe you both ended up at a _Catholic_ college,” Octavia teases. “What, Sister Anya didn’t scar you enough?”

“It’s a good school,” Monty shrugs, and takes a sip from his latte. “What about you? What are you up to these days?”

“I saw Bellamy’s fight on TV,” Jasper adds. “That was crazy. Your brother’s a badass.”

“All Blake’s are badass,” Octavia tosses her hair back, so they laugh. “I’m working at the gym now. Bell’s done fighting in car garages, now. Raven and Clarke are both good. Oh, and the Commander’s living on my couch.”

Jasper spits his macchiato all over their table, raining on Monty’s orange glazed scone. “ _What_?”

“She’s on the run,” Octavia shrugs. “She showed up in the middle of the night, and Bellamy and I took her in. We’re thinking about moving into a bigger apartment.”

“Oh my god,” Monty says, softly, because he’s clearly trying to keep calm and let Jasper do the freaking out for them. “Didn’t she try to _kill you_?”

“Like, twice,” Jasper adds.

“I’m doing this new thing where I give people second chances,” Octavia says, dry. “Guys, come on. She’s a vigilante. She’s got trust issues. She’s not a bad person.”

“No, _you’re_ a vigilante with trust issues who’s not a bad person,” Jasper says slowly. “The Commander is a _murderer_. She’s killed people, O.”

“Yeah, and that was wrong,” Octavia grants. “But she only ever went after bad guys.”

“And you,” Monty points out.

“And me.”

“But now you’re suddenly okay with her crashing on your couch?” he asks, and Octavia thinks about last night, when she and Bellamy had spent hours trying to teach Lexa different card games, but the only one she actually liked was Go Fish! She thinks about waking up to find her brother teaching Lexa to cook, just little things because she somehow managed to fuck up box macaroni and cheese earlier and he didn’t want to chance that again. She thinks about last Sunday, when Lexa trailed along after them to church even though she’s not religious, and Octavia watched her light a candle and close her eyes and just for a moment, Octavia thought she might be crying.

“Yeah,” she decides. “I am.”

The boys stay quiet for a moment, and she knows they’re having some sort of silent conversation, before finally Jasper says “Then I guess we are, too. Anyway, Monty has something to tell you.”

“It’s about your nemesis,” Monty adds. “The figure in black.”

Octavia goes tense in her seat. She hasn’t heard the buzzing since that night on the rooftop, with Lexa, and she hasn’t seen the person in black since the warehouse. With everything that’s happened since then, she’d nearly forgotten. “What about them?”

“Well, we’ve been working under the assumption that they’re anti-vigilante,” Monty starts, leaning in closely over the table, so they won’t be as easily overheard. “But what if they’re a vigilante themselves?”

Octavia frowns. “I don’t follow.”

“Okay, so, crime in Hell’s Kitchen right now is at an all-time low. And at first, we thought that was because of you and the Commander, but what if it isn’t?” She can hear the rustling of pages, and knows he must have brought out a notebook, where he’s written this information down. “I did some digging on the city’s crime rates, and it turns out that most of the big criminals--Tri Crew, Boat Crew, Sky Crew, the Kitchen Irish, bikers, the works--have been taking out each other, over the past six months. Add the Commander, who only goes after mobsters and gangs, into the mix, and you’ve still got murderers taking out bigger murderers.”

“Okay, so what does all of that mean?”

“Think of it like the ocean,” Jasper says. “Small fish eat plankton. Medium-sized fish eat small fish. Big fish eat medium-sized fish. Sharks eat big fish, and so on.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not how the ocean works,” Monty teases.

“Yeah, where do octopods fit into the equation? Or crabs?” Octavia wonders.

“Okay, fine, forget the ocean,” Jasper says. “Point is, somewhere out there, a shark is taking out all the other fish.”

“And you think the person in black is your shark?”

“It’d make sense, wouldn’t it?” Monty asks. “If you wanted to clean up the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, and you didn’t care who had to die to do it, how would you make it happen?”

“By making the garbage take itself out,” Octavia muses. “Where does Lexa fit into all this? Is she another big fish, or some outside variable?”

She can feel Monty shrug. “Coincidence exists, I guess. Maybe she just showed up at the wrong time.”

“Or the right one, depending on who you ask,” Jasper adds.

“Yeah,” Octavia hums, downing the last dregs of her coffee. “Maybe.”

Octavia climbs up the side of the building, to Raven’s fire escape that night. She could have just walked up the stairs; she has a key, but she likes being able to show off. She raps her knuckles against the window, and Raven opens it within a second.

“Get dressed,” Octavia says. “We’re going fishing.”

 

Octavia brings Raven to the warehouse.

It still smells like dust, and blood from the last time she was here. The Nissan has been moved, the chair is lying in a splintered heap, but the clamps are in a rusted pile, ruined by the rain. There’s still the bullet hole in the pillar, and Octavia’s shin gives a phantom throb.

“Nice digs,” Raven says, kicking at a chunk of drywall. It turns to powder under her boot. “Very murder-y.”

Her voice is even and wry, but Octavia can hear her heart beating a war song in her chest. Raven is terrified.

She almost doesn’t notice the second pulse, pumping slowly in the corner. Octavia dodges her kick at the last possible second, and sends her sprawling through the dirt.

The girl is wrapped in black ribbons, forming a sort of uniform. Her face is littered with scars that glow white in Octavia’s vision. She recognizes the pattern; Ice Crew.

“Who the fuck is that?” Raven demands, fists clenching, and Octavia shakes her head. She doesn’t know.

The girl hisses at them both, and runs forward.

Octavia and Raven have sparred more than a few times, whenever Raven drops by the gym, and Octavia has no clients. They move like water, back and forth, coming together and then splitting apart. And if the girl was any less well-trained, they could crush her easily.

But as it is, she’s wild, tenacious, and Octavia wouldn’t be surprised if she’d murdered someone with just her teeth, before.

But Octavia is wild, too.

Raven falls back, because she knows what the lightning in Octavia’s eyes means. The girl’s grin gleams back at her. Apparently she recognizes the devil, too.

Octavia doesn’t lose herself, this time. She’s painfully aware of every movement, every hit, every kick, every dodge and step back and lunge forward. She feels the dust kicking up around them like a veil as they move, she feels the hard cement of the floor beneath her, the stale air in her lungs, the blood dripping into her eye from a well-timed hook kick. She feels the girl’s heartbeat, impossibly even throughout it all, pulsing like a clock in Octavia’s brain. She times her hits to the sound, until finally she hears the beat stutter, and she knows she’s won.

The girl has barely fallen, before the buzzing starts to build. It isn’t slow this time, but impossibly fast--one moment it isn’t there, and the next it’s all she can feel, and Octavia falls to her knees from the weight of it. Somewhere in the background, she hears a muffled scream-- _Raven_ \--and then nothing.

When Octavia comes to, she isn’t laying on a stranger’s couch, or in her girlfriend’s bed sheets, or soaking in ice in the tub. There is no feeling of sunlight on her skin. Nothing hurts, but the dull throbbing in her brain, and even then, she’s had worse hangovers.

She’s tied up to something--a chair, it feels like. Metal, not wood. The camping kind sold on sale at Walmart during the Fourth of July weekend. The ropes are solid and strong, the kind used to pull cars out of ditches. The knots are well done, by someone with sure fingers. She’s gagged; the rag tastes like grease, from a grill, not a car engine. It’s old, chicken, possibly two weeks ago. People have handled it since then, passed it around. There’s the hint of human blood in one corner, and it’s not her own.

She breathes in; the air smells like peppermint, faintly, but not enough to mean much. Someone chewed gum recently. There’s smoke, from burning papers, not firewood. Someone was trying to get rid of evidence.

She’s in an office building. She can hear the ding of an elevator nearby. The sound of wind hitting glass windows. Octavia opens her mind and sees--nothing. The room is empty, save for her. The whole floor has been abandoned. The company’s going under, and the building’s been cut off. It’s meant to be demolished in the morning.

“Oh good, you’re awake.” The voice is female, and behind her, but when Octavia listens for a heartbeat, for the sound of breathing, the warmth of human skin, she finds nothing.

A woman steps out around and in front of her. She looks pretty enough. She might be wearing red, but it’s hard to tell; most of what Octavia sees is red.

She still has no heartbeat. As far as Octavia can tell, she isn’t alive.

“I’m sure you must be wondering who I am,” the woman says, and Octavia really wishes she wasn’t gagged, just so she could say _not really_.

“I go by many names,” the woman continues, even as Octavia gives her best unimpressed glare. “But you may call me Alie.”

 _The only thing I’m planning to call you is dead bitch_ , Octavia thinks, and then gives herself a mental high five, for the one liner.

“I’m going to untie this now,” Alie says, stepping forward and reaching around for the gag’s knot. “You may scream if you wish, but no one will hear you.”

Octavia doesn’t bother screaming, but she does lunge, and try to bit Alie’s hand. She misses, teeth just barely grazing the skin of her wrist. It tastes like metal.

“I’m sure that feels better,” Alie says, dropping the gag without much care.

Octavia makes a show of stretching out her jaw and then rolling her eyes. “Is this the part where you tell me all about your evil plan to take over the city?”

“I don’t wish to take over the city,” Alie says, perfunctory. “I simply wish to make it the best that it can be.”

Octavia scoffs. “What, by hiring Irish mobsters to kidnap vigilantes?”

“Those men were,” Alie wrinkles her nose in distaste. “A necessary evil. Sometimes, to do what must be done, I must employ less than desirable people.”

“Right,” Octavia says, flat. “And what do you think _must be done_?”

Alie blinks at her, oddly lifeless. She looks and _feels_ like a mannequin, and the thought makes Octavia shiver. “Are you familiar with the myth of the phoenix, Octavia?”

Octavia frowns, thrown off in spite of herself. “The bird that catches on fire?”

“And is reborn from the ashes,” Alie finishes. “Yes.”

“Okay so, what, New York City’s the phoenix? You want to set us all on fire, so we can be reborn?”

“No, of course not,” Alie turns to glance out the nearby window. The view must be great. “Comparatively speaking, New York is no better or worse than any other city.” She looks back at Octavia, rolling her neck smoothly, like a doll. “No, New York is not the phoenix, Miss Blake. The world is.”

Octavia doesn’t say anything. She can’t. Not when a homicidal mannequin woman is talking about setting the world on fire.

Alie rolls one shoulder back, and then the other. She looks like she’s waiting. Finally, Octavia says “What about my--friend? In the warehouse.”

“The Spacewalker, Raven Reyes,” Alie says knowingly. “She is perfectly fine. She should wake up in some hours. She will suffer some head pain and memory loss, but nothing more.”

“And Lex--the Commander?” Octavia asks, breathing a sigh of relief.

“I will admit, she was an unexpected addition,” Alie says. “But she has proven herself useful.”

There’s the _ding_ of the elevator, getting closer, and Octavia hears the metal doors slide open down the hall. Footsteps. Three heartbeats--one irregular, diabetic, the other two strong. Three figures march into the room. Octavia can smell the gunpowder on them, and the metal of brass knuckles.

“Who are these assholes?” she asks, and one of them spits out a glob of brown tobacco, splattering on the toe of her boot. She’s going to deal with him personally.

“Greeters,” Alie says. “For our guest.”

Octavia grits her teeth. She must be the guest. She hears the men--or maybe women, maybe both, it’s hard to tell--cock their guns. Glocks, and one semi-automatic. One of them has a pistol tucked into his boot, made out of rattlesnake. She relaxes her shoulders, wraps her hands around the ropes, getting ready to jump up and swing out with the chair if she has to.

Octavia hears the wind change outside, hears a miniscule crack in the window to the left of them, before the whole thing shatters. The force of it sends them all flying, knocks her chair over onto her side, and she hears the rustle of someone slicing in through the air, landing in a crouch on the floor and broken glass crunching under their boots. She recognizes their pulse.

“Lexa,” she calls, just in case she hadn’t seen her, but her fingers are already at the ropes, tugging until they come loose and Octavia can shake them off. Lexa helps her up, nearly wrenching her shoulder from its socket in her haste.

Alie’s men are awake and up, even if Alie herself has disappeared. One of them swings at Octavia--the one with the brass knuckles. She can feel the cool metal as they brush by her cheek when she moves. She can hear Lexa fighting the other two behind her, and deals with the man quickly, so she can help.

She takes his brass knuckles when she’s finished, and wipes her boot off on his face.

Lexa’s put the other two down, and is crouching over the last, her knife to his throat, teeth bared and vicious.

“Lexa,” Octavia hisses. “Don’t kill him--it’s over, let’s go!”

The Commander hesitates and then swears under her breath, in a language Octavia doesn’t understand, before smacking the hilt of her blade against his head, incapacitating him. She follows Octavia down the hall.

They take the stairs up to the roof, because they don’t trust what they might find on the floors below them. There’s a helipad, and some empty laundry lines that look like they haven’t been used in months. Within jumping distance is an apartment complex, and they make the leap, rolling along the concrete, continuing onto the complex next door, and then the law office beyond that, and finally the Hotel D’Chatrue, running and jumping until they can’t even see Alie’s condemned building, behind them.

The night is still young, and this summer’s been a wet one. Mist clings to the air, and everything in it. Octavia tries to catch her breath, and turns to Lexa, glimmering a pale red through the clouds. She can tell she’s grinning, victorious.

“You rescued me,” Octavia says, and feels Lexa fidget in place.

“It’s what friends do,” she shrugs, and Octavia smiles.

“I thought friends were liabilities,” she teases, not about to let the Commander get off easy, and Lexa huffs out a breath.

“They are,” she says, stubborn. “But, some are worth the risk. You are. Your brother is. Clarke.” She pauses, chewing at the inside of her cheek. Octavia can smell the copper, when she bites too hard. “And Raven.”

“Was that so hard?” Octavia grins. “And you didn’t even kill anyone today. Progress.”

Lexa opens her mouth to argue, but the words never come. A gunshot interrupts them, and the bullet comes out halfway through her forehead before stopping, lodged in her skull. Octavia screams and watches her body drop to the grit of the rooftop. Behind her stands one of Alie’s greeters. She watches as he brings the still-smoking gun to his mouth, and pulls the trigger.

Alie stands on the edge of the building, precariously close to stepping off, into the air. She looks at Octavia, impassive.

“Why did you kill her?”

Alie glances at the bodies below her. “Is a carpenter questioned, when he throws out his rusted saws? Or a mechanic, when he replaces old tires?”

“She wasn’t a tool,” Octavia shouts. “She was a _person_.”

Alie looks unconcerned. “She could be both.”

Octavia swallows another scream, and runs forward. She scoops up one of Lexa’s fallen blades as she goes, aiming at the center of Alie’s chest, before releasing it.

It sails through nothing, disappearing to the ground below. Alie is gone, and Octavia’s alone with two corpses.

 

It rains at Lexa’s funeral.

She was a wanted criminal, so nobody reports her missing, or dead. Clarke has a friend in the morgue who owes her a favor. She’s reported as a Jane Doe, and only they know the truth.

Father Kane delivers the eulogy. It’s perfunctory; the Sinner’s prayer, because he never knew Lexa, but he knows enough about the Blake siblings, to assume that any friend of theirs was no saint. Clarke says a few words, and then Bellamy.

Octavia doesn’t. She doesn’t have any that might fit. Lexa was alive. She was her friend. And now she’s dead. Those are the only words that matter.

Kane finds her afterwards, as the rain falls and the cemetery workers are filling in the rest of the dirt, turning into mud with each second. "Octavia," he catches her arm, looking sorrier than ever in his collar. She isn't used to actually  _facing_ him. It feels wrong, to be speaking outside of the confessional box. "I'm sorry about your friend," he offers.

"She killed people," Octavia says, and he blinks in surprise, water making his eyelashes clump. "But, she was trying to do good. She was trying to be better."

"Everyone deserves a chance at redemption," Kane agrees. "But it takes work."

"She died for me," she admits, for the first time. She hasn't told anyone--not Bellamy, not Raven, not Clarke. She's not sure if she ever will. "She was on that roof because of me."

"No," Kane takes her by both shoulders, and she's starting to shiver from the rain now. They really should get out of the weather. Pneumonia is a real threat, she's read about it. "She died, because someone chose to take her life. That will never be your fault."

Octavia wishes she could believe him.

The wake is held at Gina’s. They show up, soaked through from the graveyard, hair gnarled and makeup smeared. Gina gives them the party booth at the back, and free refills, even though it’s not eight o’clock yet.

“I may not have liked Lexa much,” Raven starts, and Octavia isn’t sure if it’s a speech or not, but everybody’s listening. “But she’d changed, by the end. For the better. And a person that can do that, has to be at least a little good, right?” She downs her shot, dropping the glass down heavily. “Yeah,” she decides. “They do.”

Bellamy raises his bottle, Clarke slotted into his side, eyes dry. “To Lexa,” he says, and they all raise their drinks.

“To Lexa,” Octavia mumbles, and drinks.

Clarke’s a wreck for days after. She sticks close to Bellamy, like she’s worried that the moment she looks away, he might die. Octavia gets it. They pulled Clarke’s ex boyfriend out of the Hudson with a cinder block on his foot. Octavia carried the body of Clarke’s ex girlfriend, to her front door. She doesn’t know much about Clarke’s family--Raven says she doesn’t like to talk about it, and if Bellamy knows he isn’t saying--but it’s not hard to assume that something went wrong there, too.

Octavia comes home and finds Bellamy making hot chocolate on the stove. She counts her steps over, and leans against the counter, careful of the hip she knocked out of place two nights ago, while fending off some bikers.

"Hot cocoa?" she asks, and hears Bellamy fish two mugs from the cupboard.

"Yeah," she feels him shrug. "Clarke and Raven are having a roommate night, so I figured we could stargaze. Like old times."

Octavia grins, in spite of herself. "It's sort of hard to stargaze when I'm blind, Bell."

"Yeah, but that's what you have me for." He takes her hand, and presses a filled mug into it. "Come on, I've got you."

They lay outside on the old quilt, sipping their drinks and sweating because it's summer in New York.

"Orion's right above us," Bellamy says. "And Ursa Minor's over there," he takes Octavia's hand and aims it, so she'll know where the constellation hangs. "And--hey, what's up?"

Octavia isn't sure why this of all things, her brother narrating the stars for her, is what makes her break, but suddenly she's sobbing against his shoulder, while he rubs her back and strokes her hair. She feels small again, like she did when she was little and hurt her arm on the playground, so he spent twenty minutes hugging her until she felt better.

"Lexa was only there because she saved me," Octavia says, when she can breathe again. "I think that's why Alie took me--to lure Lexa there."

Bellamy hums, tugging her close. "O, listen to me. Lexa died because she made a lot of enemies, and one of those enemies is a mind-controlling psychopath. But she lived because you gave her something that no one else did."

Octavia sniffs. "What?"

"You were her friend when no one else was, O. That's why she wanted to save you. And I'm really glad she did." 

"Yeah," she wipes at her eyes, her nose, and uses Bellamy's shirt as a tissue. He makes a noise of disgust and pulls away. "I'm glad she did, too." She lays back down on the quilt and pokes her brother in the side. "Where's the wolf one?"

 

Octavia wakes up one morning, rolling out from underneath Raven, and wanders out to find Clarke’s fallen asleep in Bellamy’s lap, while he reads one of his textbooks with his free hand.

She leans over the couch, to whisper so he can hear. “How’s she doing?”

Bellamy presses his mouth to Clarke’s hair, and speaks lowly. “Nightmares.”

“Seems like everyone’s having those lately,” Octavia grumbles, and he reaches up to squeeze her hand, wordless support.

“She’ll be okay,” he says. A promise. “We all will.”

“Get knocked down, get back up,” Octavia agrees, squeezing his hand back. He’s right, she knows he is. Their kind don’t give up so easy. They’re all stronger than they look.

Bellamy signs up for classes at the local community college, and more often than not he starts spending his days at the library, when he’s not in the ring. He starts fighting in real arenas, with paramedics on standby, and fire marshals in the hall. Everything’s so legal it almost feels uncomfortable; Octavia’s too used to shady car garages and random skinheads’ backyards.

When she says as much to Raven, her girlfriend laughs at her. She’s ducked under the hood of a ‘77 Camaro, covered in engine grease and oil, while Octavia’s perched on the tool bench nearby.

“You’re complaining about how _normal_ your day life is, now?”

Octavia sighs, fiddling with what she thinks might be a socket wrench. Or a screwdriver, she isn’t sure. “Not _normal_ , it’s just--we never thought we’d have this, you know? We went to look at apartments last week. We can actually afford a nice place, now. We’re not scrambling for food money. It’s weird.”

“Welcome to the upper lower class,” Raven says, knocking on an old carburetor. “We still on for patrol tonight?”

There hasn’t been any sign of Alie in weeks, but Octavia’s not about to make the mistake of forgetting about her, a second time.

“Sure,” she agrees. “I just have to run an errand, first.”

She finds Murphy on the corner of the docks, dangerously close to the Boat Crew territory, but that’s probably the point. He likes to fan the flames by starting turf wars sometimes, just because.

Octavia catches him by the throat and shoves him up against the nearest telephone pole, and he groans.

“Again? Seriously?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Octavia growls. “Tell me what you know about Alie.”

“Who?” Octavia twists the finger she broke before, just a little, so he whines. “Alright, alright, _Jesus,_ just--bitch in the red dress, right? Matrix lookin’ bullshit.”

Sounds close enough. “Yeah. What do you have on her?”

“Not much,” he tries to shrug, but her hold is too tight. “Does weird shit. Like, _superhuman_ shit. Super into world peace, or whatever. But like, through violence? Which makes _no_ fucking sense, but what does these days, amiright?”

“Where’s her hideout?”

Murphy scoffs. “Are you serious? Who the fuck knows? Bitch is a ghost. You only see her when she wants you to. And then there’s the whole,” he waggles his fingers, for emphasis. “Mind control thing. Point is, no one knows.”

Octavia frowns, trying to think of any other pieces of the puzzle she might be able to find. “What about her lackeys? Cage Wallace, Emerson, the Ice Crew girl?”

“Wallaces are underground,” Murphy says. “All the Kitchen Irish are in hiding. They’re scared shitless, between Alie and the Commander, they’re hurting _hard_. Emerson, I don’t know, who gives a fuck. What Ice Crew girl?”

“Face scars, dark hair, fights like a demon,” Octavia says.

“Ontari,” Murphy swears. “She _is_ a demon. She skipped town a few weeks ago.”

“Where’d she go?” she pushes, and Murphy scoffs again, clearly not very intimidated.

“I don’t know, the bitch is crazy. Kept talking about some mystical place far away, a different plane of existence or something,” he snorts. “Called it the City of Light. Said you couldn’t get there by plane, car, or boat.”

“So how do you get there?”

“ _Horseback_ , I don’t know and I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, it’s good riddance,” Murphy wriggles in her hold. “Can I have my arms back, now please?”

Octavia lets go and steps back, watches as he rubs at the skin she’d been clenching. “Don’t leave town,” she warns. “I might need more information.”

“I don’t suppose you might want to pay for it in the future,” Murphy grumbles, and then flashes her a sunny smile. His nose has been broken recently, so the effect is lost. “Sure thing, cupcake. Where am I gonna go, anyway? This city’s the only place that’ll take me.”

“Yeah,” Octavia agrees. “I know the feeling.”

She finds Raven waiting for her on top of a billboard advertising an adult film store, and she swings her legs over the edge, beside her.

“Hey,” Raven grins, leaning over to press her smile to her mouth.

Octavia murmurs against her lips, “Miss me?”

“Always.” Raven pulls back and reaches for her hand, fitting their fingers together. “Ready to go be heroes?”

Octavia stands, tugging her up. She can smell car paint, hear the sound of a chop shop, men shouting at each other in Russian, a little boy crying from inside a locked room, a woman screaming in an alleyway, the sound of a metal chain being dragged along the ground. She feels the weight of her pendant, St. Nicholas tucked under her shirt.

She breathes in the sounds of her city, and breathes out.

“Let’s go save the world.”

 


End file.
